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CINQUAIN Poems by Monty Mittleman

BUFFALO RIVER
Three days
paddling cliffsides.
Handfasted by water.
Moonlights opal hue; our maiden
Chuppah.

OUR TIME
First light.
Red winged blackbirds,
blushed Golden Rod, trilling.
Soundlessly breaking the surface:
tail fins.

PORCH SWINGS
See us
fulfilling dreams
of children and growing
old on porch swings, fingertips
touching.

NEW ORLEANS
Sultry
nights, fried chicken,
jazz at the Spotted Cat.
Our Remoulade: flats and your funky
black dress.

NEXT WE MEET
Greetings
at heaven’s gate:
an Adagio. Blue
shades of the Milky Way in
your eyes.

WAR Poem: A guide to building a Graveyard: by Mustafa Elsheikh Mustafa Elsheikh

Step 1: Find a place to live, preferably one that’s cozy, a corner house, right on a bus route, close to your loved ones, make sure parking is good for when friends visit for your birthday. If you want to be thorough, check for close by schools for future kids and imagine them running through the neighborhood’s streets. Above all else, make sure it has good bones. This will be your home even after it’s dust over headstones.

Step 2: Live the life you cherished, filled with soft sunsets reflected off your dreams becoming. Water the hibiscuses, mint, and lemon tree and whisper to them your stories, until they’re etched into each petal, root, and ring. Turn the dirt to let in fresh hope with a fertilizing DAP or a pinch of Nourishment, Persistence and Knotted stories.

Step 3: When you go on university tours, the most important part to check is the grass at the Quad, will your favorite spot fit you and your friends? Laying on the grass, shoulder-to- shoulder, settling into careers grooved with urgency against the setting sun. Is the dirt filled with enough dreams that you can play back like DVDs in a long car ride to another life.

Step 4: Memorize and romanticize the routes you take everywhere. Is there space for your knees and elbows to stay sprawled. Will you be able to stay in this car, staining it with maps of everywhere you haven’t seen yet. Hole marks the spot, you can peak you will see through back to then, at the route you’ve already committed to a now riddled heart.

Step 5: Leave a little bit of yourself everywhere you go, so when you look at it through the blood red lens you might see its trail and spend eternity with re-found love left for safekeeping. Hope that where you stay last, there will be peace to be found, and when that hope can’t find you, know it will grow around you, in time, at your new home even if it
wasn’t the one you chose.

WAR Poem: Suicidal Teen, by Isaura Lira Greene

feel like the whole world has gone nuts, that i have gone nuts.
that I am broken, and that the world is after me, against me.

I try to run away by proving that they are wrong, everyone i know
is successful. I don’t know what success means but it kills me.

I can’t focus, my head is cloudy and I no longer live in the body
my mother birthed. I listen to the wind, and watch the clouds from my

window, and suddenly I am no longer inside myself. I am out on the
street being run over, and over, and over again by cars that can’t even
see me. It’s a headache.

Fuck this shit. I can’t get back inside; my bones are broken.
I am not loved.

My real body is lying on the couch, being what my mom calls
“a couch potato.” A lazy fucking dunce, that’s me. The guilt deprives

my lungs of oxygen and my heart races but my muscles are as slow
and heavy as all the books that every kid is forced to read about the
history of the world.

What’s my name again, Mom? Do I even have a name anymore? It feels strange
to say on my lips. Well I can’t remember it, but I am sure it

has something to do with the stupidity of my parents genes
making me stupid. I am sure it has to do with all the rotten

scum that made this hell called earth, where there are demons
with sharp teeth and blood craving… blood…to make life
to live…I need a knife.