Saint Michael Triumphant Over the Devil, With the Donor Antonio Juan

Oi, Mr. Patron Saint of Bankers,
won’t you take your foot off my tail? 
It’s hardly a fair fight, is it:
I’m much smaller than you
and made of duller metal
like some discarded robot,
a machinic sob story, that’s me. 

Show some respect for your elders.
Here you are, head in golden sky,
Jerusalem on your chest like bling, 
while I’m rusting and writhing 
on my belly in the mud
like it’s something I enjoy or my job.

As if that isn’t enough, I have to listen
to your mate over there 
droning on with his psalms 
while you dismember me
with a sword which cost more
than all of my rust put together.

What a way to go: chopped up
and bored at the same time.
I thought I might go with a bang
or with a Jezebel (which is the same thing). 
You seem to forget there’d be no swords, 
psalms, gold, bankers without me. 

You lot make me sick. You make 
my stomach bring up snakes.
What you gonna do when I’m dead, hey? 
Kill the frigging painter, poor Bartolomé?
Well, watch out. I may be a goner,
but there’ll be plenty of others coming after.

There’ll be plenty who’ll take my place: 
other robots, underlings, small Satans.
You can’t win because you can’t
do without us, however you detest us. 
And for now, you self-righteous sod,
I’m at least going to bite your foot. 

Jonathan Taylor

Jonathan Taylor's books include the novel Melissa (Salt, 2015), the memoir Take Me Home: Parkinson's, My Father, Myself (Granta, 2007), and the poetry collection Musicolepsy (Shoestring, 2013). He is director of the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester in the UK. His website is www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk.

He Flatters Me

I am smudge, but somehow, the artist renders me
elegant,

a chiffon darkness on a heat-shimmering beach,
my aloneness

foregrounded, sightlines strengthening my distance
from the crowd. 

He swaddles us all with a gentleness 
reserved 

for the newly-born, cradling us 
where we are. 

A golden heat rests briefly on our heads 
before trickling 

elsewhere. Like any heliotrope, I turn 
towards it, marking 

where drops have fallen. I will gather them 
up

into a book, later to revisit the time 
I was so beautiful.

Devon Balwit
​
Devon Balwit writes in Portland, OR. She has five chapbooks out or forthcoming: How the Blessed Travel (Maverick Duck Press); Forms Most Marvelous (dancing girl press); In Front of the Elements (Grey Borders Books), Where You Were Going Never Was (Grey Borders Books); and The Bow Must Bear the Brunt (Red Flag Poetry). Her individual poems can be found in The Cincinnati Review, The Stillwater Review, Red Earth Review, Tule Review, The Ekphrastic Review; Noble Gas Quarterly; Muse A/Journal, and more. Please look for her on Facebook.

                      
On First Reading Li-Young Lee’s "Eating Together"

I hold the page that holds the poem under my breast 
where it rests against ribs.  My heart with its resonant 
thump makes itself felt in its cage.

Its pulse on the page shakes the words ginger sesame
fingers and I feel the warm fragrance of this meal
that  a family takes together weeks

after their father dies.  Alive, he held his food deftly
between fingers the way my father did. 
I know the light touch.

The father dies in the poem lonely for no one. 

But my father, on a fine June day, went to his office 
and shattered his life all over the x-ray room.
Understand how a quiet death blanketed in snow

is music that eases this dangerous lesson.  
The notes come from a place where it’s possible 
to trust the silence that follows.

Judith Bowles

This work is in response to the aforementioned poem. The painting was selected by the editor and did not prompt the poem.

Read Li-Young Lee's poem that inspired this one, here:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/43015

Judith Bowles lives, writes and gardens in Washington D. C. She has an MFA from the American University in short fiction and taught creative writing there. Two of her stories were selected for the Pen Syndicated Fiction Project. Her poems have  been published in The Delmarva Review, The Innisfree Journal of Poetry, and Gargoyle. Her book, The Gatherer, was published by WordTech Communication’s Turning Point in November of 2014.

La Maja Desnuda

You recline wet and nude on my canvas
a perfect success of curves and
the bent knees of submission.
I close the blinds on the eyes of the world
so only I can watch you slowly dry,
your damp hair and sweaty skin.

But eyeing the pallet like one last drink,
I give in to a drunkard’s temptation.
Pushing for a beauty beyond perfection
I try adding to you, thickening 
your lips or making them tremble.
I mix paints with tiny bird feathers, 
ashes of my journals, salt from my sweat, 
beach sand to match my stubbled throat, 
and glass, ground fine as pollen
to sparkle your cheeks.

I search for new brushes:
a thin brush to tickle you,
a flat hard reed to mold you,
a heavy housepaint brush to smear you
and prove my detachment from your image.
I search the house for new tools,
my toothbrush, my babyteeth, my backbone,
a scorpion to see if you jump,
if its trail would slur new patterns
of delight onto your wet skin or
if he might be dazzled and drowned
in your colours.

I fear I’ve gone too far.
I want to remove that sharp edge
of your beauty, the heavy breasts,
the willful cross of the arms, 
the dazzling eyes. My hands shake. 
I cannot work quickly.
I run through the house
turning on the stereo, television,
radio, dishwasher, trying
to lure my senses from you.
I sweat for you through the din.

I return and throw my whole body
against the canvas, falling back
stained with your image.
I paint in deafness. I paint out your eyes
and make you a beggar with bloody knees.
I try to secret a flaw on the canvas so
the drying paint will peel back 
and flake away. I shake 
the canvas to see what you’ve been hiding,
expecting secret pentimentos
to fall from your mouth.

My knees finally weaken
and I slump in the chair.
I paint your eyes back in
and they shine in victory.
I wipe the blood from your knees
and find your thighs flushed.
Your chin juts out defiantly 
beyond the canvas. Your hands 
could mold me into submission now,
holding my brush and turning it
to thicken my mustache or
deepen the blue of my eyes.
I look up to see you 
reaching toward me.

m.j.smith

m.j.smith teaches literature, mythology and writing courses at City College of San Francisco. smith's recent work has appeared in Alba: A Journal of Short Poetry and Corners of the Mouth: A Celebration of Thirty Years at the Annual San Luis Obispo Poetry Festival. smith works in the Mission district of SF and lives at the foot of Mount Diablo in Concord. voyagecities.wordpress.com

As the Fox Bones Speak

Under the whitest moon she finds the body of a fox, 
shot, the bullet hole like punctuation

By midnight she has scoured the forest for the missing bones. Arranged the skeleton of Vulpes vulpes beneath a tree. Her neck’s bristling, which means a man has crossed her path. Her legs freeze.

He’s pressed to the earth in front of her, squinting over the lip of a ridge; nose twitching, stink rising, quickening the air. 

It’s a week since he jumped ship and started hacking his way back to his slim-hipped vixen waiting for him in a hidden cabin. She’s sick. 

It takes him a month to reach her. A month to lay out the bones he’d taken from the woman in the forest—tarsals, carpals, fibulas, tibias, ulna, sacrum, distal phalanges, ribs, scapular and skull—rearticulated to form the mandala she’d bewitched into being. 

Done, he turns to his dying lover. Traces her like the fox. Begs the bones to speak.

Marjorie Lewis-Jones

Author's note: "I saw Jessie Imam’s Untitled #4 (fox bones – pattern) and it made me think of oracle bones, and how ancient Celts and shamans inscribed questions on bones, and believed that bones have voices (much as some people today still believe their dead ancestors speak to them). Imam hoped her artwork portrayed ‘acceptance of our bodies’ inevitable destruction, rather than one of fear’. But I’d already conjured a man who could not accept the destruction of his lover’s body—and was desperate enough to resort to many things, including ‘scrying the bones’ (in his own way), to try to heal her."

Marjorie Lewis-Jones is an award-winning Sydney writer whose poetry and prose has been published by Spineless Wonders, ABC Radio National, Picaro Press, Poetry Australia, Cordite, Uneven Floor, Hunter Writers Centre, Best Australian Writing 2015, the ACU Prize for Poetry 2016, and other anthologies. She runs the literary blog, www.abiggerbrighterworld.com

Glass Slipping Through Fingers

Heat sand enough, burn and char it like scorched earth
and it will melt and ooze. Kiss and slip into a new form

Where once its home was an hourglass, slowly
ticking away the minutes, a processional. Grain by grain.

But now we’re both blistering together in our own
personal supernova, forced to forgive time and instead gaze

Upon one another’s reflections. Where you were onyx,
you’ve now become supple and soft. Where I was fickle, I’ve now

Become stone. Where we grew and waned together,
there is a chasm. And the only way to bridge the gap

Is to break the glass.
​
Sarah Clayville

Sarah Clayville: "My work has appeared in journals such as The Threepenny Review, StoryChord, 1:1000, and others. I am a high school English teacher and freelance editor for several online journals."

This poem was inspired, "by a series of photographs documenting disturbed graves where bones weren't taken but rather scattered in an almost beautiful fashion. I found them in a set of antique National Geographic magazines as I was cleaning an archive." The original photos were by Gregory Jennings in "Buried Beneath Time," October 1952. The photo shown here is a phenomenal photograph by Clem Onojeghuo, but it is not the original source of inspiration.

Disconnected  

Picasso paints my insides 
with the outsides
of his weeping woman:
her violet, cobalt, tourmaline hair
sweeps to jigsaw colours
cutting deep.
White skewers, green clamps,
blue creases, purple, yellow
pleat her face into angles that say
don’t touch.

Such a lonely place.

I want to ask her if she is clenching
her handkerchief with her teeth
to express grief, or if those three green
fingers claw at it, as two yellow eyes
of fingernails look on with that jagged
white stovepipe of a thumb.

What rips at a mind like that?
What can repress it?

Energy weeps in colours chiseled
into shapes—they cut
the chords in the throat.


Kitty Jospé

Reprinted from Kitty Jospé's 2012 chapbook, Mosaicq, with permission from Finishing Line Press.

Kitty Jospé: "After retiring as French professor, I completed a low-residency MFA at Pacific University in 2009, and teach ekphrastic writing in summer to teens at our local literary center which is a short walk from  the University of Rochester museum, Memorial Art Gallery where I have been a docent since 1998.  I also give lectures on bringing poetry alive by careful study of art."

Mary Cassatt

Mary, you forged new worlds.
Choosing art over marriage, motherhood, and men,
You created life in the sphere
To which you were oft times
Restricted.

You painted us absorbed
In our work,
Our children,
Our craft
And defined our moments
Of self,
Solitude,
And strength.

Untraditional Mary Cassatt
Who valued tradition  
With strokes as discerning as our mothers’ voices,
You elevated us to Milton’s Aonian heights.
We are commanding and dignified,
At ease on your canvas.

Jo Taylor

Jo is a 35-year teacher whose favourite genre in the classroom is poetry.  In the past several years she has found herself writing poems alongside her students, and their submissions of their work to one-line journals and other contests have encouraged her to do the same. Jo’s favourite hobbies are writing and hanging out with her two-year-old grandson. She and her husband live in a small community outside of Atlanta.