Why He Stands to One Side
by David Rosenthal

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.

District Annex
by David Rosenthal

The district needs the space for cubicles –
they’ll park their cars where children used to play.

The classrooms will be gutted and rebuilt,
the backstop, slide, and monkey bars will stay;

the rain will turn the garden plot to silt,
the sun will cause the murals to decay;

meanwhile, canvas swings will sag and fray
unused, unless the wind brings ghosts to play.

District Annex – 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. 

The Hum Everywhere
by Lindsay Illich

Between a pair of mismatched
socks and a round fugue.
Dirndl and a shot.

A man walks down
the street, talking on his cell.

A car idles at the corner.

The blues light of television
in every window, the tint
night. The hum everywhere

trying to be heard
above the making it.

As if the noise, too,
wanted to be more
than what it is:

vicarious, unusable,
the background of a life
it will never know.

The Hum Everywhere – Lindsay Illich

Lindsay Illich teaches writing at Curry College in Milton, MA. Her work has recently appeared in Improbable Worlds: An Anthology of Texas and Louisiana Poets.

Calendary
by Lindsay Illich

Low as the heart’s low
     thrum, dark as moon wink.

The camp of mind, as dust
     losing its place in the caste
   of mystery. Recall the piano bench,
a door jamb, losing
all taste for living here.

The little house in a row
     of little houses forgets to mean.

The middle life of books
     and paperclip, a diaper’s
          heavy weight, the dog’s bowl
               always empty again.

Dram of aspirin, hum
of appliance, awl. Winterness
a carved carbuncle of January.

Like a splinter, this isn’t where
we were supposed to be.
Like errata, then waking up again,
kneeling at the coffeemaker,
bargaining with what gods will listen.

Calendary – Lindsay Illich

Lindsay Illich teaches writing at Curry College in Milton, MA. Her work has recently appeared in Improbable Worlds: An Anthology of Texas and Louisiana Poets.

Myrna Loy’s Early Films
by Kenneth Pobo

They made her exotic,
meaning non-white, “Oriental,”
a woman who easily ruins men
just because she can. Why

was this exotic? When I think
of corporations ruining men,
no one calls them exotic—
they’re job creators
though the jobs went poof.

Loy’s victims? Who were they,
Little Nell? Dimwits
who blame everyone but
themselves? Maybe they’re
the exotics, hothouse flowers
that withere outside of
the greenhouse. Or
they trap women and ooze
bile when they fight back.

By the mid-30s, Loy would be
urbane and martini’d, shedding
her exotic but still erotic look—

foreclosures rose while
bankers put a whole country
in a picnic basket
and had us for dinner.

Myrna Loy’s Early Films – Kenneth Pobo

Kenneth Pobo won the 2011 Qarrtsiluni poetry chapbook contest for Ice And Gaywings. They published it in November 2011. Also published in 2011 was Tiny Torn Maps, a collection of microfiction, from Deadly Chaps. He teaches creative writing and English at Widener University.

I Knew this Guy
by Kenneth Pobo

who for many years had
a lot of money
a nice home
a nice family
that he complained about but
paid every bill until

he lost his job
just like that
no warning

his stocks blew up
debts mounted

the house moved away
from him
courtesy of the bank

he often said he hated
kooks and creeps
who rabble-roused and
protested
hoped the cops
would round them all up
and imprison them

He changed

Courageously

he faces

pepper spray and weapons.

I Knew this Guy – Kenneth Pobo

Kenneth Pobo won the 2011 Qarrtsiluni poetry chapbook contest for Ice And Gaywings. They published it in November 2011. Also published in 2011 was Tiny Torn Maps, a collection of microfiction, from Deadly Chaps. He teaches creative writing and English at Widener University.

Chaos of Theory
by Terry McDermott

in the chaos of this moment,
everything looks like tornado winds.
twist and spin, fly and fall;

torn apart, torn down. like buildings
abandoned or a spent subway newspaper
caught in the air stream of the passing train
news too slow never read, rarely noticed in and
among the media maelstrom;
that forms, informs and misinforms. we’re
overwhelmed, as everything seems frantic
and moving fast to what end.

we’re familiar with a certain chaos, though
we may use words like hectic and demanding.
this day’s chaos is out of context.
we’ve become consumers, and rumours.
ruled by the omni-chaotic, guilt-inspiring
shelves of choices and channels.
the new and improved
shampoos, computers, credit cards and cereals.

at this moment, we all look disheveled
caught with our gloves down and another
haymaker’s on the way. until we
climb out of the ring, wipe at our
bruised faces and cut the face-
book tightly-knotted umbilical cord.
to find a quiet place where we can live
with our disquiet, our unease for a simple
moment and leave them behind.

i look for reason or reality in this chaos
of a million pebbles in a million ponds
that ripple the water,
and gather momentum.

and i find none, the sense of change
is a wave that has breached the dyke.
a wildfire that has jumped the break.
and people are no longer hidden
in trenches, entrenched in the belief

that their voice is out of tune,
that their power is only in their
wallets, that shrink each day,
that they are just consumers, taxpayers,
not citizens or people with
values, of value, with
rights and wrongs, with
a place that they need to repopulate.

i have removed the barricade of
reason and reality
from my equations and calculations.

and i don’t mind the chaos.
it leaves in its wake fragments
of ideas, thoughts, alternatives
that we can pick up later.
think about. understand that
hope doesn’t break like bamboo
and potential is not lost
but a spring wound up
ready to be released.

no i don’t mind this chaotic moment
i just would like a hill
to sit on, to watch
to wonder.

Chaos of Theory — Terry McDermott 

Terry McDermott is a writer living in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Terry wrote Sing the Hymn: Elegy to a Bottle. He received the Jane Jordan Prize and his work has been published in Bywords, as well as e-zines. Terry’s writing can be found at www.terrymcdermottwriting.com, which also features prose, some music, a blog and a buffalo. He co-wrote a seven episode web series, Vita Bella: The Dogumentary, four of which have been completed and can be seen on YouTube. He co-wrote , Villanelles a deux, in August 2011. Additionally, Terry, employed by the Government of Canada, has written in a variety of formats, particularly articles and speeches.

We’ll Build
by Tony Burfield

I’ll build a fire tonight
against the cold and against
technology and against the federal
reserve.

We’ll build a fire tonight,
crouching in flannel shirts
and Achilles boots,
fire in the brick box in the dry
wall box in the 2×4 box
in the wooden siding box.

We’ll build a fire
and breathe the pine smoke
and taste the grit and get splinters
from gently, delicately, pulling
thin, dry kindling off
logs.

We’ll build a fire tonight
and remember something deep
something not forgotten
but misremembered
and rusty, something embryonic
and more human than the keys
we type.

I’ll build a fire tonight,
and it will burn and smoke
and crack with snap,
with expanding resinous tree blood.
We’ll build a fire.

We’ll Build — Tony Burfield

Tony Burfield lives with his wife in Boulder, CO and works at the public library. When not running wild in the hills or streets, he reads, writes, and saunters by the creek. His poetry collection “Canid” won the Green Fuse Press 2010 chapbook contest.

The 1%
by Frederick Pollack

I buy him, he buys me
with what we made divesting ourselves
of the last vulgar matter in
our portfolios. Then I buy Charles,
who owns the water somewhere.
Managers are let go
with manly hugs. Without regret,
they buy one home where we buy eight
in various sylvan glades.
And at each turn we create jobs:
drivers, pilots, gardeners,
my tailor – extending rank on rank
as in old posters
to the greenwood where frontiersmen
still, undoubtedly, spit on their hands,
build houses, and will one day buy us all.

Flunkeys labor in the clouds;
we, on a lower floor,
like to be part of things. But this year,
misguided people mar
the park below our window. Pete,
of Euro-Pacific Capital,
went down to film himself
attempting to instruct them; they were rude.
We put up a sign –
“We are the 1%!” –
in response to their silly boast,
and by the window drank their health in champagne.

It’s cold down there. At night,
they look like maggots in their sleeping-bags.
We can see through their tents;
would have total data if needed.
By day they do the repetition thing –
nonsense, objections, divagations
all with the same enthusiasm.
One girl on a generator-bike
is their flywheel; I think
she stared at me once.
“You’ll get more out of me,” said Leon, late
of Goldman, “if you treat me with respect.”
It’s not even that. We only
want simple humanity.

The 1% — Fred Pollack

Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems, The Adventure and Happiness, both published by Story Line Press. Other of his poems and essays have appeared in Hudson Review, Southern Review, Fulcrum, Salmagundi, Poetry Salzburg Review, Die Gazette (Munich), Representations and elsewhere. Poems have most recently appeared in the print journals Magma (UK), The Hat, Bateau, and Chiron Review. Online publications in Big Bridge, Hamilton Stone Review, Diagram, BlazeVox, The New Hampshire Review, Mudlark, and elsewhere. Pollack is an adjunct professor of creative writing at George Washington University, Washington, DC.