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.
