Welcome Home

By Meagan Cumbie

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So you’re a hitchhiker on the side of the road asking for help,
So you climb into the first truck that stops and slam the door.
So there’s a man and his wife,
And she’s beautiful,
And he’s not special but he’s telling all the jokes,
Asking where you want to go.
And you keep looking in the mirror,
And you know you shouldn’t want it but you want him to look too,
Because you don’t feel very beautiful and you think it would help,
So you pull into a rest stop and the sun goes down.
So she’s snoring and you can’t sleep,
So you walk into the bathroom and there’s nobody around for miles,
And you sit down but nothing comes out,
So you unlock the door and turn around.
and he’s in the bathroom too.
So you’re bent over in the dumpster waiting for the next moment,
When his hands are on you and it doesn’t feel good,
Doesn’t feel the way you thought it would.
So you run outside and keep running,
Until the sun comes back out,
And you put your hand back up.

Anodyne

By Michelle Levy Schulz

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23rd Street’s Crow
is majestic even in repose.
Larger than a chicken
bent over in the dumpster
with ebony feathers fluffed.

Hallucination of what the crow could tell me.
Other thoughts are like confetti or
fake food flying into the audience
the shingle at the back of their tongues
finding damage in the plastic artifice.

I’ve seen him before
over the awning of a taco store.
When I stopped then
in admiration
a cocked eye clocked me looking.

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Michelle Levy Schulz is a poet and a writer living in a tall tower in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She likes to make eye contact with hawks if they swoop by when she is at her desk looking out the window. Her work has appeared in BlazeVox, EOAGH, Poets for Living Waters, Reflections on Little Eagle Creek, and SRPR Spoon River Poetry Review. Some of her poems are published under Myl Schulz because naming and identity are complicated.

Passover Redux

By Kyle Hunter

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At bible study, the kids are deciding
which of them would die
if there was another passover,
and whether step-siblings count,
and how they might pray
that someone else’s puppy
was the first in the litter, and how
the only way not to die
would be to kill,
and whether that is the way of God
or of the whole world, and how hard
they think it would be
to get that kind of blood
off their hands and clothes,
and whether the shingle at the back
of their tongues tastes like knowledge
and pride, and whether that
knowledge and pride are the type
that condemn or redeem.

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Kyle Hunter is a poet and managing editor of the literary journal the 50. His poems have appeared in Main Street Rag, DASH, So It Goes, Rockvale Review, New Verse News, Rat's Ass Review, and elsewhere. His poem "Peach Tree on Winfield" was nominated for the Best of the Net prize by Flying Island.