Special FeaturerbdAndy Powell, poetry, special feature

Andy Powell: Quiet Again

Special FeaturerbdAndy Powell, poetry, special feature
Andy Powell: Quiet Again
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The Rev, a re-telling

                                    after Eve Ewing

 

I’m reading The Wheel of Time on my fluffy ass bed, mom never skimps on fluff, stoned, ok, fine, I’m napping, mostly, but I need something to tell mom I’m doing because she’ll probably try to discern whether my eyes are bloodshot because of allergies or weed and she very much always approves of reading whatever it is. She’s the only one I have to worry about catching me tonight, which I’m pretty comfortable with because dad has a way better sense of stoned. Dad is out for the night, guy’s night. The men are piling into the Reverend’s van. He doesn’t drink, so it’s perfect. It is a 45 minute drive to the strip clubs in Providence, but much better than to run into anyone else they know.

The heat breaks while they’re on the highway and the rains lash the windowshield until the Reverend says sorry, boys, we’re going to have to pull over and wait it out. The rains flood the highway until all the men are supposed to have come home, and the water is up over the wheels so even if the rains stop they will have to wait till morning it to subside. They turn the radio on and the only station they can tune into is playing Beyoncé’s Lemonade all night. Six inch heels, she walked in the club like nobody’s business, murdered everybody and I was her witness. The van floats out to sea, where T belches and figures they’ll be able to hook some fish, stripers this time of year, he’s pretty sure, at the least. They laugh, then are quiet again.

Andy Powell is a Teaching Artist for DreamYard in the Bronx, has poems out or forthcoming with Winter Tangerine Review, Voicemail Poems, Bad Pony Mag, elsewhere, is a reader for Adroit Journal, and is a 2018 fellow to The Poetry Foundation & Crescendo Literary's Poetry Incubator.



Special Featurerbdgillian parrish, special feature, poetry

Gillian Parrish: Just When We Thought We Could Turn

Gillian Parrish is a teaching-geek who currently divides her not-enough-time between stacks of papers on brain-gut neuroscience in the classroom, persona poetics, community policing, and a mermaid tale for her sweet little niece. Her poems have appeared in various journals such as Gulf Coast, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Literary Review, and forthcoming in Volt. She's the mothership behind spacecraftproject, an arts and poetry journal with an ethos best summed up in the words of said 4-year-old niece (hope for the planet), who, at Christmas dinner, solemnly remarked that "We are all connected. In a web. Like The Force."

Special Featurerbdgillian parrish, special feature, poetry
Gillian Parrish: Just When We Thought We Could Turn
Special FeaturerbdPhilip Schaefer, special feature, poetry

Philip Schaefer: Everyone Else’s Darkness

Philip Schaefer’s first collection of poems Bad Summon won the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize from the University of Utah Press and will be released Summer 2017. He is the author of three chapbooks, two of which were co-written with friend and poet Jeff Whitney. He won the 2016 Meridian Editor’s Prize in poetry and has work out or due out in Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Thrush Poetry Journal, Guernica, The Cincinnati Review, Salt Hill, Bat City Review, The Adroit Journal, Baltimore Review, and Passages North among others. He tends bar in Missoula, MT.

Special FeaturerbdPhilip Schaefer, special feature, poetry
Philip Schaefer: Everyone Else’s Darkness
Special FeaturerbdDavid Hanlon, poetry, special feature

David Hanlon: As Fickle as an Orange Is Orange

David Hanlon is from Cardiff, Wales, and currently living in Bristol, England. He has a BA in Film Studies & is training part-time as a counsellor/therapist. You can find his work online in or forthcoming with Calamus Journal, Occulum, Riggwelter Press, Dirty Paws Poetry Review, Into The Void, Impossible Archetype & The Rising Phoenix Review, among others.

Special FeaturerbdDavid Hanlon, poetry, special feature
David Hanlon: As Fickle as an Orange Is Orange