expulsion
alyssa hanna

the apple is where adam lives now;
in the throat of a hollowed hornet’s nest—
i heard that the choking wouldn’t stop but
he kept saying my name.

man’s first deed was purpling the earth, sticking his
thumb in the mud to bruise
as he tried to assist in the planting, born

to push boundaries: he placed me in a portrait
and painted me plum—

the garden was mine.
the garden was always mine.

he performed half-finished surgeries
and called it medicine.
the life i woke to—fruit. full.
i cupped my own breasts and named myself.
i’ve always bled melon water instead

of the red he called—a green apple
is just as good as scarlet. and here is where i am
now: picking

tangles from my hair
trying to escape the framework
of museum, of serpent’s tongue, of
a prison that pulls ribs
from the cages of man’s first sin.

~ ~ ~

alyssa hanna's poems have appeared in Reed Magazine, Mid-American Review, Naugatuck River Review, Arc Poetry Magazine, Rust + Moth, Pidgeonholes, and others. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and for Best of the Net, was a finalist in the 2017 James Wright Poetry Competition, and a semi-finalist for The Hellebore scholarship. alyssa is a Contributing Editor at Barren Magazine and works as a copywriter by day. She lives in New York with her three lizards. Follow her @alyssawaking on twitter, instagram, ko-fi, and tumblr.

Taking the Boat Out After the Burial
Forrest Rapier

   I.

        Reckless drums pound buckskin beats
inside the headstrong horseman
riding under shadow of no moon.

Embers steady, then flare like blue
cornfields untended for a season.
Two decades of snow on his face & he still doubts

       the springtime predictions written-in-corollas
on the firstborn foal’s bloody forehead.

II.

This summer, he has hacked every outskirt azalea bush
      & whispered gratitude to the fog obscuring his scent.

He rows a loaded boat of white azalea upstream,
        whorls old songs from his young lungs & pulls

the pine oars shoreward. He hauls the woven wreath
        to Grandfather Pond where roe fawns graze on sweetgrass.

III.

        He will grow to know an ambush by the disturbed mud,
a trail of saw palms beat-back by dull hand-axes.

        Nude rivals crouch behind that mossy log.
He traced their footprints, obvious like foxfur
pressed in yesterday’s sleet.

Hush—they will cut off our hair
        if we fall asleep.

~ ~ ~

Forrest Rapier is the winner of a University Poetry Prize awarded by the Academy of American Poets. His work has appeared in Best New Poets, Texas Poetry Review, The Boiler, and Portland Review, among others. He is currently a lecturer in the English Department at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

The Dead, San Lázaro Municipal Cemetery
Jeff Schiff

The walled dead
            Those conventionally interred
                        Those who were trundled

by pomade and patent leather cavalcade
            down swept cobbles
                        Those bounded by

live growth & evocative topiary
            Those ablaze with artificial everylasts
                        Those garlanded from the getgo

Those bearing urned homage & floral afterthoughts
            The lapidary dead
                        The buff & shine

housed forever in veiny stone dead
            Those sequestered behind gilt mesh
                        The laid to rest behind peekaboo cruciform dead

The stacked in their alabaster tri-level
            colonnaded
                        uplit bunkhouse dead

The good riddance they are gone dead
            The karma’s a bitch
                        even if you are Catholic dead

Those who draw visitors by their absence dead
            Those who draw by guilt
                        Those by intersectional irony

The wrapped in novel quotes dead
            Those mantled in bilingual cliché
                        Those defiantly minimal

Those shoeboxed for economy
            Those rough mortared in poverty
                        The once entombed

but scattered for backpayment dead
            The murdered and all but bodiless dead
                        The vaporized but placemarked dead

Those who shortstopped their last ride through glass
            Those who lurched
                        and those who beelined toward their ends dead

Those who welcomed their maker
            Those who dug mightily in against
                        Those pressured to acquiesce

The empty coffined
            likely living on the lam in Peru dead
                        Those counted on to keep it quiet dead

Those whose power occasioned death
            Those whose meekness hastened it
                        The product of funerary forethought dead

The no fucking clue too busy
            let someone else consider it dead
                        The no one gets out of this alive dead

Those who abut the encroaching jungle
            Those pelted by morro fruit
                        when La Niña wafts

across Calle de Recoletos
            Those whose rest is imperiled by earthquaked walls
                        Those sluiced nearly to the surface during monsoon

Those tendrilled into oblivion by flame vine
            Those now near the new waterclosets
                        Those now near the chicharrón and mango vendor

Those whose stones pay Moorish tribute
            Those a little bit Maya
                        Those a little bit Jew

Those screaming lover’s tangle
            Those lured by luster and damned by pique
                        The lapsed but allowed

for the right price dead
            Those repellent even in the afterlife
                        Those who challenge the notion of good works

Those invoking the expected Christ
            Those invoking a more intemperate sort
                        Those protected by bleached virgins

Those by discredited saints
            Those who conjure debate
                        about corruption & redemption

Those safeguarded by perpetual care
            Those safeguarded by
                        a pronounced lack thereof

~ ~ ~

In addition to That hum to go by (Mammoth books, 2012), Jeff Schiff is the author of Mixed Diction, Burro Heart, The Rats of Patzcuaro, The Homily of Infinitude, and Anywhere in This Country. His work has appeared internationally in more than a hundred publications, including The Alembic, Grand Street, The Ohio Review, Poet & Critic, Tulane Review, Tampa Review, The Louisville Review, Tendril, Pembroke Magazine, Carolina Review, Chicago Review, Hawaii Review, Southern Humanities Review, River City (The Pinch), Indiana Review, Willow Springs, and The Southwest Review. He is currently serving as the interim dean of the school of graduate studies at Columbia College Chicago, where he has been on faculty since 1987.

Elegy for Burying
Terin Weinberg

At eighteen, I buried bodies for quick paychecks.
My mom’s friend who lived off the main road

of my town offered me the job. On my first day
I wore an emerald wool sweater, the sleeves wrapped

tight around my palms. My hands felt foreign. I held them
like a set of temporary tools. I slid into the passenger side

of the old Ford pickup, the tattered leather exposed
its yellow-bellied foam. My gardening gloves lay in my lap

and I regretted bringing them, pastel-pink, covered in ladybugs,
there would be no light-hearted luck found from them today.

The tires of the truck rolled through the wet graveled graveyard,
each press of the gas pebbles sunk deeper into the humid rubber.

From the bed of the truck I pulled wooden boards for coffin
supports, velvet shags to mask the cold metal of the foldable

chairs I would line in rows. I pulled turf rugs from the bed to cover
the winter’s true ground, barren and waiting for sunlight. I found

the metal straps and crankshaft to lower the casket into the ground,
into the hole in the New Jersey topsoil. My ladybug gloves gripped

the crankshaft tight when the body began to lower. The weight
of the wooden casket made this first body the easiest that year.

~ ~ ~

Terin Weinberg is an MFA candidate at Florida International University in Miami, Florida. She graduated with two B.A. degrees in Environmental Studies and English from Salisbury University in Maryland. She serves as the Poetry Editor for Gulf Stream Magazine. She has poems forthcoming in Swamp Ape Review and Moon City Press. She has been published in journals including: The Normal School, Flyway, Red Earth Review, Dark River Review, and Waccamaw.