Dom Blanco

Urbs in Horto – City in a Garden

Where I journey through alleys that run like rivers

of piss & trash & cigarette tar

Where I listen to police & ambulance sirens

reverberate through the city’s perfect grid system

& to a woman declare she is trans & that she

will skin the man that beat her

Where I watch the poor jab needles into their ankles

from tents on Lower Wacker Drive

Where I learn the wind doesn't reference nature

but the nature of politicians

& the color of your skin determines life expectancy

Where the musk of flesh is finely pressed

into CTA buses & ‘L’ trains

Where I wheel a man with no working feet

down 3 blocks on State Street

Where the City in a Garden that once burned

still does today.

Long Night in Chinatown

Profusely screaming . . .

why

I do not claim to know

I have arrived

at the corner of Cermak

when the man in distress

demands

What are you looking at!

What are you looking at!

demands

the man in distress

at the corner of Cermak

I have arrived

I do not claim to know

why

profusely screaming . . .

Cricket Hill

On this man-made hill, I am what is

hardly the gladdest thing

under the weakening sun.

I do not touch the more than

hundreds of small flowers

nor do I pick one. I look to the towers

& clouds, longing to see

past the horizon. And

when the light finally recedes

there, & the lights of the city

begin to show, I will start down,

to somewhere I call home . . .

---

Dom Blanco is a Cuban-American writer originally from Miami, FL, now based in Chicago, IL. He holds an MFA from Randolph College.

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Charis Morgan

From the Porch

The possum perches in the apple tree

past the moon’s rising. Three dogs circle,

their barks harsh, sudden ripples in the stillness.

Pest control recommends treating every possum

as if it is female, as if it is carrying young.

She hisses with a hundred needle teeth.

Arms crossed, I watch the standoff

in the two-tree orchard. The old dog

plants himself three paces back, wagging

his stub tail. His jaws have crushed bones

and turtle shells. Suburban wild and wary,

the possum resigns to an uncertain safety

in the crook of the limbs.

Chilled in oversized cotton short and shirt,

I admire her versatility – show teeth, play dead,

claw up a tree for plunder. From perpetuity,

rites of survival. How long will she crouch

in the tree, risking her spine over a few sour apples?

I envy the audacity of thieves

and their willingness to risk body and future

to gain, in some eyes, trivialities. I sit in a theater

with the man I love after months more apart

than together. How much will we risk over each other,

after stealing pieces we don’t intend to return.

I would not be afraid if I had not watched him

peal away so much of me.

I cannot recall how she descended,

whether she pocketed the apples or not.

The old dog would have liked to snap her neck

like the one before, when she must have broke

for the fence. The possum remembers her night

of pillaging far better than me, returning to sleep

in that loft alone.

Panzanella

I remember snapdragons coming up like spears

to my chest in my mother’s garden, color of a honeybee’s

stripe, marmalade, and fireworks. Their columns of wavy lips

closed, softly inviting to suck my little finger, to kiss

my nose if plucked. My mother gifted an armful of lilies

to her grandmother and regretted it. She warned me to look,

not touch. Today I am falling into the art of panzanella. Bread ends

toast in the oven, cold tomato skins give way to my knife

with a pull forward or back. A sign of dullness, my lover would say.

The long and hefty cucumber now dissected beneath my hand.

He liked to narrate with the senses as he cooked, timed by pops

and aroma, spent hours crafting a meal disappeared in minutes.

I tear fresh mozzarella apart and am left with a soft film of fat

on my fingertips. With my left hand, I strain ice water

from the red onions, shocked into a softer tang. I shred the basil

and recall a dozen gardens that grew like children, tended or neglected.

The refrigerator hums so loudly. I could not bear to live inside it

any longer than I did. For years, my instinct was to create distance,

to keep a knife between me and the object, to pull on gloves

before planting seeds too old to sprout. Today I have made myself

the sweetness of summer out of season, and I delight

at the heart of the tomato and flesh of the cucumber,

fresh and fragrant. I would give half my years

to live each moment like this, by mouth and hands.

---

Charis Morgan is an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama and an assistant poetry editor at Black Warrior Review. Her work is forthcoming in the Florida Review, Colorado Review, and elsewhere.

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Sarah Davis

Mary's Hysteria

Someone’s job it is.

Sweep out the barroom before the morning drinkers.

The wind, which sends the peanut shells back inside.

The beach, which wanders down the hill from there.

Sand churned up overnight, now hardened and cold.

Sandpipers scatter where the sand has some give,

closer to the worry of waves.

Up ahead plain as day—are you walking there?

I look. Are you? If I see you, I see you

as if in a cave.

Gloved. If I see you at all I can’t tell.

My mind’s eye remembers the sea and you and the swell of stony sky.

Someone’s job it is.

The first one arrives, named Mary, and she has a story for me

about the time she woke and could no longer see or feel, those two senses gone.

It was before the war, but the war was coming—

air raid sirens and black curtains and smaller portions all around.

The loss of sight and touch lasted a few hours—

father brought a doctor in—but after tea she began to recover,

the first face she saw her own in the ceiling as though in the clouds.

She drinks until sundown. Someone walks Mary home.

Birds scatter like bones in the rough weather, feathers roughed up.

Fathers blend into the old stories like ash.

A bright red blouse on the jetty rocks sharp with mussels,

the taste red with salt and new blood.

My fingertips trace your jawline, that ragged coast.

I miss all the gone people all the time, those people I never knew.

River Town Rising

From inside the room the rain.

A black spread of soaked branches.

A warm December play.

I can’t see my feet in the water.

The bones won’t come into focus.

In the water the rain, from inside the house.

The birds mostly want. The squirrels.

From the house the smell of cooking.

There you are. From you the rain.

The hills are veering. The ragged run.

One morning and the logging truck.

The brink of sun and then the road.

The river a new color and another each

time I call it river and the rain

that rose it high under the gun. There

you are. From inside the house

look at me and after the rain the man

climbs the highway with trees on his back.

From a distance the place. I’m certain.

From you the place remembers me.

You were a long time ago, in absence

and plaid scarf with rainboots

a small black leaf on your upper wet arm

after you take off your shirt the leaf

the scarf, the boots, after you the rain.

A hand on the slick muddied skin

A breath not deep enough but broad.

---

Sarah Davis has published in a number of journals, including Pleiades, Fence, Drunken Boat, the Antioch Review, and Epoch. She has an MFA in poetry from the University of Montana.

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