June 2019

Show us what those tentacles can do. This pride month - we ask you to come out of your shell and slip into your skin. Use your suckers to send your fantasies over to the editors at The Stay Project.

Grace Yannotta

of existing in june and of being a woman

to place myself at the very center—
how keen; how little I connect
with my corporeal form anymore.
when the odors of flowers dance
under my nose, it’s difficult to
feel physically present. songs
wake me up sometimes. I
savor the feeling of goosebumps
because that’s a signal that I’m
still alive. june is my favorite
month. my mother and grand-
mother went out of their ways
to buy me church dresses but I
couldn’t stand the crinoline
scraping against my knees. God
hasn’t been active in a long time
but dresses. they do something
for me.

Grace Yannotta will start her freshman year at UNC this fall, double majoring in English and Political Science. She has work published or forthcoming in Parhelion Lit, Night Music Journal, Pider Mag, Rabid Oak, and Rise Up Review, among others. You can find her on Twitter @lgyanno.

Cheryl Caesar

The SOTU slant

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —

• Emily Dickinson

Nancy Pelosi leans into the clapback,

head tilting, lips firming to an off-center smirk.

Joshua, the bullied Trump boy, dozes off,

head lolling sideways.

AOC slumps, arms folded, and gets called a sullen teen.

All enacting with their bodies

a country out of kilter.

All of them, human spirit-levels.

Like that scene in “East of Eden,” where Elia Kazan

tilts the camera back and forth

as Adam forces Cal to read the Bible.

Dutch angle, as they call it.

Soon we will take the set back, put it straight.

Till then, we are the camera.

Cheryl Caesar lived in Paris, Tuscany and Sligo for 25 years; she earned her doctorate in comparative literature at the Sorbonne and taught literature and phonetics. She now teaches writing at Michigan State University and gives readings locally. Since January, she has published political protest poems in Writers Resist, The Mark Literary Review, Agony Opera, Winedrunk Sidewalk and Nationalism, a Zimbabwean anthology. When it’s all too much, she escapes to books, cats and Michigan lakes.

Benjamin Goluboff

The Fraying of the Flag

Over time and under

the repetitive stress

of flap and wave,

of flaunt, brandish,

and signify, a small parting

will open in the fabric,

or in the fabric

an opening will part

as the flag rides the sky

or accommodates the wind,

and over time

the parting will extend

into a tear or rent

as if the flag

were mourning itself,

rending the garment

that is itself,

and when the rent reaches

the back seam

it is no longer a flag

that flies, but

the banners of two

minor nations.

Benjamin Goluboff teaches English at Lake Forest College. In addition to some scholarly publications, he has placed imaginative work — poetry, fiction, and essays — in many small-press journals, recently Unbroken, Bird’s Thumb, and War Literature and the Arts. He is the author of Ho Chi Minh: A Speculative Life in Verse, and Other Poems (Urban Farmhouse Press, 2017). Some of his work can be read atwww.lakeforest.edu/academics/faculty/goluboff/

Mark Luebbers

Rig

I’m riding my bike down

Kings Highway into town

And another local guy

in a high-wheeler Ram

rolls by in a cloud

of tire tread rattle

and blast of cat-back exhaust.

He’s been mudding,

and clods spin

and dribble across the road

and the sidewalk in triumph

as if, from his chariot

he’s strewing shit coins

to the peasantry.

Fixed to the 5-foot posts

stuck in each black back fender

a big flag snaps hard,

struggling to stay attached.

Confederate on the left

stars and stripes on the right

ratty, fraying fast

and stained with the juice

of today’s attack on the woods.

He floors it through the yellow

and his back window wears

the emblems of his scared outrage:

Suck On It Snowflake

Make America Great Again

Trained To Kill Outdoors

and

For Sale Call:

Mark Luebbers teaches English at Stoneliegh-Burnham School in Greenfield Massachusetts. His poems have been included in recent issues of Apple Valley Review, Blue Line, The Wayfarer Magazine, Wilderness House Review, and Kudzu House. In 2018 his collaborative poems with Ben Goluboff appeared in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing, published by Black Lawrence Press. Mark also received 2018 Pushcart Prize nominations for poems which appeared in the The Hopper and Eastern Iowa Review.