Issue > Poetry
MRB Chelko

MRB Chelko

MRB Chelko is Assistant Editor of Tuesday; An Art Project and author of two chapbooks: The World after Czeslaw Milosz (Dream Horse Press, 2012) and What to Tell the Sleeping Babies (sunnyoutside press, 2010). She has recent work in POOL, Indiana Review, Forklift; Ohio, RealPoetik, Vinyl Poetry and others.

Ode to June

and cold Brooklyn Lager at days end they end the sun dunked low and orange in the sky's hoop I hope for soon a clear head as it has been humid beyond conception inside me and in this sprawling gray sentence of a city punctuated by half naked comma people parenthesis of trees so why do I go on forever water flows up endlessly from the Marcus Garvey Park sprinklers the afternoon bikini kids with their flavored ice brand new skin hysterical laughter now fast asleep I was young once I am young still but expected with beer and cigarette looking out from this window over the world and at the edge the old men hunched and gambling over upturned boxes in midnight street glow look like relics of some long abandoned and unpublicized war Harlem a meadow overgrown around them the sidewalk a trench decades weathered but I can imagine anything because it is finally summer the stubborn earth unfurled

Ode To June

and coffee which has drawn by now its dark line down my center one wound of winter unhealed by spring summer sunlight can't get inside me I've spent my whole life reinforcing this body you know if you cut me open little soldiers would scatter like vermin wielding swords and pinchers on the weekend I buy promotional one dollar tacos and let the sidewalk lead that's not true I stay home and watch the dog chase flies through the apartment she catches them in her mouth and spits them out black and twitching from outside I hear the playful scream of someone and the passing of a bus

Poetry

Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor

Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor
Feminine Ending

Poetry

Abayomi Animashaun

Abayomi Animashaun
Beggar's Colony'

Poetry

Justin Skylar Belote

Justin Skylar Belote
Elegy With No One Speaking