Gunpowder
like graphite on fingertips

precedes
the rudderless bloodletting.

Ruthless
men rule

Cities
of corpses strung from

Electric
wires where blackbirds

Perch
before ripping the air like

Newsprint,
torn by trembling

Hands
black beneath the nails.

Words
are magic incantations;

Newspapers,
blankets or kindling.

Gunpowder Like Graphite – William Haas

William Haas lives in Portland, Oregon, and teaches at Western Oregon University. His writing has appeared in River Teeth, Fiddleblack, Dark Mountain, The Portland Occupier, and elsewhere.

Blood-orange poppies fill the flower bed where a plastic sign reads FOR SALE BY BANK. Falling in fistfuls, rain washes windows. I nudge my face to the dusty pane. The furniture has been cleared out. Drywall remains as crumbs on the carpet. Electrical wiring is stripped. Post boards mark the outlines of rooms. Two saw horses stand in a shaft of light. On the plank in between sits a plastic toy. Past the empty rooms, plywood and fiberglass insulation spill through the shack’s broken window, expelled like herniated intestines. Outside, a crow clutches a foil wrapper between talons and electric wire. The black bird’s beak nurses nutrients from smudges of corn syrup and traces of oats.

Foreclosure – William Haas

William Haas lives in Portland, Oregon, and teaches at Western Oregon University. His writing has appeared in River Teeth, Fiddleblack, Dark Mountain, The Portland Occupier, and elsewhere.

You with the tiny forward slash scar
marking your mustache
You with your camera stare like
an aspen eye

You with your
contrarian countenance squarely set
in highgloss portrait
a Bakken plain man profile
captured grit in megapixel rudd

          unlike the old west miners, gaunt with damp and dark
          ungrinned for the turn of the century smoke lens

You the root of all western destiny, manifest in hazel glare
Rough neck, stubble muzzle,
          chemical dust, oil soaked brim

Oppugn the plight of the jobless, not you sir.
You follow the work, angle the consequence later, smug in the now.

You Occupy the Field – Kierstin Bridger

Kierstin Bridger was the 2011 winner of the Mark Fischer Poetry Prize. You can find her additional award-winning poetry in the 2012 issue of Memoir (and) due out in June. Kierstin’s work can be found at Nail Polish Stories, a tiny and Colorful Literary Journal, Stripped: A Collection of Anonymous Flash Fiction from PS Books; a division of Philadelphia Stories, Smith Magazine’s 6 Words about Work, the Porter Gulch Review, Telluride Inside . . . and Out, and Bricolage. Bridger has forthcoming work in the May 2012 issue of Thrush Poetry Journal and the May issue of the Mountain Gazette. She is currently pursing her MFA at Pacific University.

That pothole
under the bridge that’s
being retrofitted behind
concrete Jersey barriers tagged
with black graffiti and
an eight foot construction wall painted
baby blue, which
redirects traffic into
one lane so dump trucks can
come and go except
during rush hours when
gridlock quickly
frustrates commuters whose
tires chew into asphalt with
stops and start-ups day
after day–two times a day–for
almost one year,
has doubled in size.

Infrastructure – Sally Elesby

Sally Elesby is an artist who lives in Oakland, California. A burgeoning poet, “Infrastructure” is her first completed poem.

Oil rolling down the arroyos
oil oozing over reservoir dams
oil bubbling up in the foyers and conference rooms
oil leaking up through the petroleum-based carpet
oil sweating from the petroleum-based Walmart floor
(ordinary lonely consumers slipping in oil,
falling and breaking their oil filters and filing lawsuits)
oil dripping across the market research spreadsheets
oil buoying up the daytrader swimming
the oildark sea into oil backing up from storm drains
oil congealing inside Sport Utility Vehicles
and trapping entire families
can’t get the oil out of my wings
oil, warm oil surging up in the toilet at the speculator’s office
and lapping at the stockbroker scrotum,
lubricating modern para-economic membranes.
Oil in mudpie puddles and kindergarten cubbies
oil in the life-support transparent tubing
oil in Galicia and Galápagos
oil in the very feathers of Darwin’s informative finches
oil dangling in black threads from their beaks
can’t get the oil out of my wings
oil rising up in a wind-driven
earthquake-shuddering tsunami smearing coastal cliffs
oil cuddling the kids in the surgical ward
oil drips from the wounds of insurgents
and even from the breast implants and hair
and organ transplants of oil czars and czarinas
can’t get the oil out of my wings
oil oozes out the remote tuner
that slips from your hand and you can’t get the oil off
you rub and rub your hands out out damp spot
but oil gushes from your crotch
and oil puddles in your sacral dimples
your armpits and adenoids and clefts and cleavages
and you run naked to the shower to wash off the oil
and it sticks and you rub but it thickens
and oil curdles at the shower nozzle—
it’s talking now, babbling, hotter and hotter
we’re all Ophelia floating in oil
can’t get the oil out of my wings
the oil is in flames, your cat is igniting
your television looks at you pleading,
crying for help before it implodes
can’t get the oil out of my wings.

Can’t Get the Oil Out of my Wings – Bob Schildgen

Bob Schildgen is known to a million readers of the Sierra Club’s magazine Sierra as the environmental advice columnist and blogger “Mr. Green.”  A collection of his columns, Hey Mr. Green, was published in 2008 by Sierra Club Books. His poetry has appeared in Atlanta Review, Peace or Perish: A Crisis Anthology, Stoney Lonesome, and other publications, while his prose has found a home in venues ranging from the alternative press’s Berkeley Barb and Pacific Sun to mainstream newspapers and magazines such as the San Francisco Chronicle and California. A native of Wisconsin’s west coast in the Driftless Zone on the Upper Mississippi, he is a longtime resident of Berkeley, California, where he “intensively gardens and pontificates.”

for Scott Olsen

An officer holding a megaphone calls it
before the half-light breaks over Oakland.
500 policemen pummel the camp awake
with batons, rubber bullets and tear gas.
We find video instantly, watch the sky torn
up with flash-bang bursts and hook-trails
of smoke descending on Snow Park.
We learn of the first protester to suffer
critical wounds. He served his tours in Iraq
without injury, shipped back in time for war
at home. It doesn’t matter what fractured
his skull. Beyond rage, beyond our fear
that with night comes a matching crackdown,
it’s another martyr we dread at McPherson Square.

I Now Declare this to be an Unlawful Assembly – Benjamin Walker

Benjamin Walker is an MFA Candidate in Creative Writing at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia.  His poems recently appeared in PANK, SOFTBLOW, Orange Quarterly and other journals.  New work is forthcoming in Mobius: the Journal of Social Change.

October 23, 2011

It gets tense if the assembly’s wrists go limp.
We let our hands dangle when we disapprove,
wave when we’re willing to march in support,
and form crosses along our chests when a move
will spur us into hard opposition, sending us home.
A homeless man sitting outside the circle, donated
trench coat, black knitted cap, drops his water
bottle on the grass, and starts to scream back
about how he’s had it with our fucking assembly,
our drum circles, communal loaves and droning talks
that never end. Frantic members from the Mediation
Committee run after him as he reaches the street,
giving his own speech on why Jubilee won’t come,
agitating the police, staring into traffic for an hour.

 A Dissenter Breaks Protocol – Benjamin Walker

Benjamin Walker is an MFA Candidate in Creative Writing at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia.  His poems recently appeared in PANK, SOFTBLOW, Orange Quarterly and other journals.  New work is forthcoming in Mobius: the Journal of Social Change.

for Mohammed Bouazizi

In the public square I search for you, Mohammed.
Can a single degree matter? Can I ignore the signs
asking for change and roll up my window, or turn slack,

force my eyes into a kinder shape as a baton strikes
my knees? You showed me that, for all our demons-
trations of will, we’re governed by the same rules

that set us in motion at the beginning: The swiftest of us
finding weak points at our borders, escaping, the sly
outlasting, the sick eaten first. We can’t wait

for appointed hours – they come when we pour gasoline
on our fruit stands, on ourselves. This truth came
from my fall: death comes suddenly, surely as a deep scrape.

Should I give up, or should I weld myself in place,
soldered to an earlier stage of grief? Is it too late
to engage in denial? Too late to bargain? You be the judge

of my integrity. Try me. Test me. We’ll see if fire refines
my resolve, makes it unbreakable. But Mohammed – I
project your path, foresee fire-teams of militant bankers

and survivalists joining arms against the poets, perpetually
outgunned. In time I pray for the salvation of land
mines, the brutal clarity of a demilitarized zone.

I slice my soft hands open, searching through cabinets
for an unchipped glass of water. I abandon the square
where your testimony began. I seek the safety of sun-

less Metro tunnels, the comfort of wet concrete. I stop chanting
about freedom, stop test-flicking my lighter.
You weigh me in the balance, baptize me in gasoline.

The Werther Effect – Benjamin Walker

Benjamin Walker is an MFA Candidate in Creative Writing at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia.  His poems recently appeared in PANK, SOFTBLOW, Orange Quarterly and other journals.  New work is forthcoming in Mobius: the Journal of Social Change.

The stars are pinned in their places.
Not a single one has been lost or added.
Orion glitters in his belt of jewels.
The Big Dipper spills her mouth of black sky
into the never-ending river of black sky.
The earth still spins on its axis
through the vastness of space around the sun.
All the planets dutifully follow their orbits
and occasionally line up to vibrate
as a mysterious, harmonic force
then break up and drift home, like after a really good concert.
Spring still turns to summer, then fades to autumn, winter.
The moon goes through its phases
as the snake sheds its skin, swallows its tail.
But tonight I feel things are different.
It’s not the earth that has changed direction.
Time still ages, I’m going to die—it all ends badly.
But tonight, here in our encampment
as we try to keep warm, feed ourselves
go to the bathroom, clean our clothes, dry our bedding
organize, organize, organize
when I look up at the stars
I don’t curse them for not allowing me to fall amongst them
or for leaving me behind, finite.
In the constellations I don’t see the old myths
but make new connections.
Our circles around the sun, our cosmic cycles
are no longer a monotonous, boring routine to me.
Tonight, gravity has a purpose.
It holds me to a place I want to occupy.

The Stars Say We Belong – James Henderson

James C. Henderson has published poetry in a variety of literary journals including Haute~Dish, Double Dare Press, 42opus, and Poetry Midwest and has participated in numerous poet/artist exhibitions at The Crossings at Carnegie in Zumbrota, Minnesota. A member of OccupySaintPaul, James lives with his wife, Athena, in New Brighton, Minnesota.

Despite the fact that escalators move,
he found himself at some point walking up —

as if he willed the movement of the crowd;
as if his will had something left to prove.

When he was still a boy he’d climb the down,
then turn around and barrel down the up,

or pace himself to fall into a groove,
applying will to will to hold his ground.

But now one will wins out above the rest:
as motion all around him escalates,

pedestrian momentum is compressed
to be usurped by more momentous fates.

Why He Stands to One Side - David Rosenthal

Rosenthal lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and two daughters. He teaches kindergarten and first grade in the Oakland public schools, and he teaches poetry at Cazadero Music Camp and the Writing Salon. His poems and translations have appeared in print and on line in Raintown Review, Measure, The Chimaera, Unsplendid, Blue Unicorn, and several other journals. He has been a Pushcart Prize nominee, a Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award finalist, and a semifinalist for the Richard Wilbur and Donald Justice Poetry Prizes. His website is http://users.lmi.net/rosen4.