Raúl Sánchez

The Shelter of Your Chest

Guard my backside from the thin knives

of their dreary eyes

guard me between azaleas and marigolds

guard me between wood and musk

in your misty meadow

guard me, between the roots of cedar and maple

in your snow covered mountains

guard me burrowed in the wet sand

ocean waves brush

guard me between twilight and the early light

between mist and rain, thunder and storm

in the rainbow, guard me between azure and purple

guard me between the sheets of your bed

tucked in like balled socks

guard me from disdain

guard me::

guard me inside, outside,

over, under and beside you.

Let us guard each other from the fallible

keep the torchlight on, raise your red rose

I am your warrior.

Raúl Sánchez, conducts workshops on The Day of the Dead. His most recent work is the translation of John Burgess’ Punk Poems in his book Graffito. His inaugural collection, "All Our Brown-Skinned Angels," is filled with poems of cultural identity, familial, a civil protest, personal celebration, completely impassioned and personal.

Luisa Villani

Curse: Upon Those Who Have Used My Kindness Against Me

A star burns in the black sky.  The stars burn

to exhaust their anger, and I stand on my roof

waiting for the kingdom of how dare I.  I stand

on my roof filled with the anger that burns its way

out of the star, and I am afraid my anger will erase me,

that I will vanish as I flame upward in the breeze.

O rush of flesh, blaze in the blood, fever

down to my toes.  Fortunate star.

I stand on my roof stirring wind,

and I say Now, anthemic fire.

Peace.  A swallow.

May curbs disappear at your footfall;

may you stumble just a little; may smallness

gum up your luck.  When you feel your great momentum,

may you face a shit pile of inky dinky rules.

May your street be too narrow for two cars,

your home too thin for your dreams.

May a feather fall on your shoulder

and leave mites.   May wee utterances

plague your order: Where is my…?

Why did I…?  May you never know.

May all your harbingers be writ

in the cuneiform of bird tracks.

May your air contain particulates,

may it silt your lungs,

and when you lie in bed wheezing

may you strain to a light sound—

the wisp of something on your roof.

You only wanted to hear it singing.

Now it shatters you with its voice.

Luisa Villani is a former Wallis Annenberg Fellow at The University of Southern California, a Bucknell Younger Poet, an Academy of American Poets Prize awardee, and a winner of an Associated Writing Programs Intro Journals Award.  Her work has appeared in The New England Review, Prairie Schooner, The Literary Review, Kaleidoscope Magazine, The Birmingham Poetry Review, Third Coast, Hawaii Pacific Review, Hotel Amerikana and many other journals.  She has taught English in Dnevpropetrovsk, Ukraine, and currently resides in Princeton, New Jersey.

Paul David Adkins

I Consider Similarities Between Baghdad’s al-Furat Mosque and The Dresdner Frauenkirche after Reading Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s Sightseer

The mosque resembles
            not at all 
the soaring Frauenkirche,
Athassel Priory,
            nor even
the gleaming ruins
of Hoare Abbey.

War is all they share,

that, and fists of frightened women
pounding heavy doors.

The mosque squats
beneath its dome of mud
sculpted the shape and color
of a Vidalia onion.

It barely clears the ten-foot wall
topped with razor wire
enclosing it.
 
Tank tracks rut the nearby mud.

I’m not a tourist.
I’m hunched in a Humvee
armed and draped
with fifty pounds of armor.

I’m not stopping to admire
the inner ablution font
or qiblah wall.

I couldn’t enter
if I wanted to view
the ornate musalla
or raised minbar,
discern Allah
amid the calligraphic Arabic.

In a second
we pass
its burr of doves which lift as one
disintegrating sheet
before a pair of passing choppers,

the sound of their rotors
slapping against the mosque
like a panicked woman
finding the doors
locked, and bolted, and chained.

Paul David Adkins grew up in South Florida and lives in New York.

Sarah Hulyk Maxwell

The Old

Behind the stone wall
we gathered and slept
on the nearly frozen wings of men.

Our need was greater—backs
bare and steaming.

Could we have left some
centuries before—sleeping
in the gentle hay of dusk
un-solid? And our children
 
—would they have realized—
 
were given the gray
feathers, torn and bent, looking
like ripped ashes and strings of hair
as they flew.
 

*

Cold Birds

With fisted claws they flew like shadowed spirits
the owls, drunk
on heavy snow. Me,
watching the dark
bell (half-eaten) sway
on the crabapple tree.

My mother cries
at the thought of death
feasting on birds who hide
in bushes iced with frost.
 
You ask suddenly if I—standing
close to the window—am cold and without
thinking I say no and collapse

again into a silence as we strain to hear winter

slip from the roof.

Sarah Hulyk Maxwell is pursuing her MFA in poetry at Louisiana State University. Her work can be found in Three Line Poetry, Ruminate, connotationpress.org: an online artifact and Muse & Stone.