Stopover
by Rikki Santer

Drop me off somewhere in suburban Ohio
where nostalgia conjures me with a topaz
wand and I am still waiting. Not hometown,
call it tabernacle where a front yard cloak
of dogwood blossoms stands in for the whole,
where tame childhood in peach gingham thrills
when concrete mixer truck in striped churn
rattles past the playground, when glint of Girl
Scout compass nestles in Mill Creek silt. Yet on
bedroom wall a doe-eyed Keane reminds
that timidity is a false-bottomed boat. Black Leather
Jacket grinds his body into mine in a tufted field
behind the school. Terrier’s neck snaps broken
in a neighbor’s backyard. Suicide note on dresser,
feet sway like the tongue of a bell. Memory blows
on ashes to scatter them—give & take.

IMAGE:The Waiting Room by Nieves Mingueza.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Rikki Santer’s poetry has received many honors, including five Pushcart and…

Picasso made me tough and quick, and the world;
just as in a minute plane trees are knocked down
outside my window by a crew of creators.
Once he got his axe going everyone was upset
enough to fight for the last ditch and heap
of rubbish.
Through all that surgery I thought
I had a lot to say, and named several last things
Gertrude Stein hadn’t had time for; but then
the war was over, those things had survived
and even when you’re scared art is no dictionary.
Max Ernst told us that.
How many trees and frying pans
I loved and lost! Guernica hollered look out!
but we were all busy hoping our eyes were talking
to Paul Klee. My mother and father asked me and
I told them from my tight…

dreams I dreamed
by Mark A. Fisher

I am still waiting
for a future I’ll never know
like the ghost of this house
lingering with unfinished business

I am still waiting
for a past that fades
like the sepia-toned photos
of people without any names

I am still waiting
in a now that hurts
like a sunburnt back
always peeling away in layers

I am still waiting
to be remembered
like the words on a page
in a universe doomed to forget

the wishes of a child
of blown out candles
like the dreams I dreamed
all this time I’m still waiting

PAINTING:The Birthday Cake by Le Pho (1975).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: When I started this poem, the tenses just seemed to come naturally, since “waiting” implied a tense, as did “still.” The other stanzas mirrored back at me, and so the last stanza became a mirror too.

Paris Riots 68

“The world in the 1960s was a world on fire with change and revolution. It does seems strange, then, that when discussing the French New Wave the point of politics often receives only the lightest brushstrokes. Many are familiar with the Left Bank Group and their political leanings towards socialism and the radicalism of the left. Most fans of the Nouvelle Vague are aware of Godard’s radicalisation later in his career. But what about Truffaut, Chabrol, or Godard before 1968? Were they really, as is sometimes murmured in academic circles, right-wing radicals and fascist sympathisers? How could they be fascists, when their films were so humane? What happened to Godard in the late 1960s? And if the Cahiers directors were so preoccupied with truthfully representing life, how could they do this without having some consciousness about the political world around them? … In film, this…

“February 10, 1971, on a Wednesday night in the East Village, a full moon glowed in the wintry sky over St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery. Inside, a group of New York’s most cutting-edge scene-makers gathered at the Poetry Project to hear a reading by poet and Warhol aide-de-camp Gerard Malanga. Andy was there, as was Lou Reed, along with poets Gregory Corso, John Giorno, Joe Brainard, and Bernadette Mayer. First up that night was a dark-eyed, lanky young poetess by the name of Patti Smith. An up-and-coming playwright named Sam Shepard, with whom she’d recently become involved, was there in support, as was her closest friend and collaborator, Robert Mapplethorpe. Smith knew she didn’t just want to read that night; rather, she wanted to electrify the audience with poems that possessed the power of rock ‘n’ roll. She invited the guitarist Lenny Kaye to play while she recited, and she decided…

The New York Times reports on a poll finding that 15% of Americans believe in QAnon conspiracy theories.

Those are the findings of a poll released todayby the Public Religion Research Institute and the Interfaith Youth Core, which found that 15 percent of Americans say they think that the levers of power are controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles, a core belief of QAnon supporters. The same share said it was true that “American patriots may have to resort to violence” to depose the pedophiles and restore the country’s rightful order…

And fully 20 percent of respondents said that they thought a biblical-scale storm would soon sweep away these evil elites and “restore the rightful leaders…”

Mr. Jones said he was struck by the prevalence of QAnon’s adherents. Overlaying the share of poll respondents who expressed belief in its core principles over the country’s total population, “that’s more…

“Yarrowstalks was an underground newspaper (and later a magazine), primarily based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that published 12 issues from 1967 to 1975. It is notable for being the first publication to publish the comix of underground cartoonist Robert Crumb. Unlike many underground papers of its era, Yarrowstalks was not explicitly political. Like the San Francisco Oracle, Yarrowstalks combined poetry, spirituality, and multicultural interests with psychedelic design, reflecting and shaping the countercultural community as it developed in Philadelphia. Yarrowstalks was noted for its innovative use of color, graphic design, and cold typeoffset printing. (The name of the publication is derived from Achillea millefolium [‘yarrow’]; the stalks are dried and used as a randomizing agent in I Ching divination.) In addition to Crumb, other notable contributors to Yarrowstalks included Timothy Leary and the editor/publisher Zahn. Yarrowstalks was the brainchild of Brian Zahn. The first…

PAINTING:Pine Barrens Treefrog by Andy Warhol (1983).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Like everyone, the current crisis had seeped into pretty much everything I do, but fortunately the benign spirits of my recent ancestors are there to offer advice. With their faith, practicality and superstitions, they have all the tools to put the apocalypse back in its place.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Oz Hardwick is a UK-based poet, photographer, occasional musician, and accidental academic, whose work has been widely published in international journals and anthologies. His chapbook Learning to Have Lost (Canberra: IPSI, 2018) won the 2019 Rubery International Book Award for poetry, and his most recent publication is the prose poetry sequence Wolf Planet (Clevedon: Hedgehog, 2020). A keen collaborator with other artists, his joint collection with Amina Alyal, Close as Second Skins (Indigo Dreams, 2015), was shortlisted for that year’s Saboteur Best Collaborative Work award, and he…

I Am Passenger; He Is Driver
by Shannon Milliman

I am passenger. He is driver. He is scheduled to test for his driver’s license.
He has asked if he could drive the two-hour route, mostly freeway
And with light waning into hours of darkness.
I told him yes, he could drive but every cell in my being wanted to say no.
I am still waiting for the moment when the gift of agency
Feels triumphant.

Do you know what it is like to give up control in the seat of the driver?
To have uncertainty that the flesh and blood in your male mirror image has the practice and mental agility to drive in City conditions at night getting his sister and mother and self to safety?
In my mind I whisper that he wants to preserve himself, too.

There is no reason he would want to fail in this…