Robert Manaster

Cost of Development


$659.30, $44.46, $700.00+…………………………………RFP ads.
$324…………………………………………………………City staff trip.

       Bones, clipped and tabbed,
       Cardboard constructed, hung
       For a middle-school science fair —
              Bones of a project
       Put into a box
       Labeled for later use:
       How the Body Works.

$80,000………………………………………………………Per acre.
$14,474,357……………………………………………….Construction.

       Set near majestic
              Columns,
       Bones of the Capitol:
              The white-
       Marbled, chiseled Lincoln
              Gravely
       Implores a nation to be
              Moved.

$375,000+……………………………………………………Property tax.
$160,000…………………………………………………..Management.
$600,000…………………………………………………..Total Op Expense.
$285,000…………………………………………………..Sales tax from retail center.

              Bones of crop abundance!

$40,000………………………………………………….…Developer contribution.
$500.00 and $250.00………………………………….….Move for single-wide.
$900.00 and $600.00……………………………………..Move for double-wide.
$70,000……………………………………………………..No-int loan to landowner.
$500.00…………………………………………………….Per household. 
$5750………………………………………………………Per mobile home
                                                                                              (< 624 sq ft)
$9.21……………………………………………….………Per additional sq ft
$.50…………………………………………………………Per sq ft for 2nd  bathroom
                                                                                              (or more).

       Bone plates of a thought
              Wild for the scent of peeled grapes.

$70,000…………………………………………………….City property contribution.
$150,000…………………………………………………..Landscaping & bike path.
$55,000…………………………………………………….Public improvement.

       Bones of the absent tail —
              A figment of balance.

$16000……………………………………………..………Bad credit history fund.
36 months…………………………………………………..Rent differential pymts.
$4500……………………………………………………….Extra-expense appeal:
       $100………………………………………………..……   Shed delivery cost,
       $64.20…………………………………………………….    Telephone installation,
       $24.79……………………………………………………   Cable rehookup,
       $3000.00+………………………………………………..     To move.  (Denied.)

       Bones of the hand
       And their minutiae of movement
              To hold on.

$326,416………………………………………..………….Relocation benefits.
($107,416)…………………………………………………Shortfall.
$240,000……………………………………………………Recapture upon closing:
       $70,000…………………..………………………..……   Repayment of city loan,
       $41,000……………..…………………………………..   Developer contribution,
       $130,000………..…………………………………..….   Site development.
$85,000 of $70,000 ($15,000 over)………………………….City loan to owner.
$250,000……………………………………………………..Property tax estimate.

       Bone memory
       In blood,
              The clear
       Cell fragments
                     From inner bone.


 


About $450,000 total.

Bones of the imagination
       Are scattered like a pair of dice…………………………………………………


Robert Manaster’s poetry and co-translations have appeared in numerous journals including RosebudThe Virginia Quarterly ReviewImageHayden’s Ferry Review, and Spillway. His co-translation of Ronny Someck’s The Milk Underground (White Pine Press, 2015) was awarded the Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation. He’s also published reviews in such publications as RattleJacket2, and Rain Taxi.

Sonnet Mondal

Grandparental Kisses

Last week, as I was gazing at the sky, sitting on the rooftop of our house, moonlit visages of my grandparents reflected in my mind — as if both of them were watching me from the window of my childhood. I sat ruminating over the dividing line between life and death — how illusory it was! The very actuality of afterlife seemed like the fanciful chapters we write in our slumber, quivering to death in the dragnet of daylight. My grandfather, while murmuring prayerful songs at night, used to say, “You would learn immoral things in life—things that would reveal themselves as insidious or misleading. They are addictive; tempting even without being tasted. They are a test, which if you fail to ignore, would haunt you in your nirvana. If you befriend them, you may not be found suitable, to be put back to life again in this beautiful world.” 

My nostalgia fetched me the memories of a day — 25 years ago — when my grandmother, took out a hundred Rupee note from her closet, kissed me on my forehead, and gave it to me as pocket money. “Have sweets and ice cream with it.” My joy knew no bounds and I decided to cache it for coming times. Even after so many years in employment, that note remains priceless to me, for I couldn’t spend that note for many years, and the warmth of that kiss on my forehead still keeps it crispy. Later on the same day, my grandpa planted a kiss on my forehead when I told him to stop a group of woodcutters from cutting trees. He told me, “The jungle knows to defend itself. It is more powerful than our conception about it. That it is silent, is its humility and one day it might come out of the cocoon of being reticent, to tame our ever progressive minds.” His farmhouse in a remote village in eastern India, the cows he used to look after, the expansive stretches of paddy fields — he used to take me to see these wonders, and the bedtime ghost stories were like echoing snapshots—striking my melancholic mind, bouncing back to nowhere. Last week, these memories, like incessant waves, were tossing me up toward their moonlit images, pulling me down to reality in the very next moment.

The day after, with a strong urge to meet my grandparents, I drove down to my maternal village. I parked my car by the roadside, and started walking through the village – unrecognized. The lands, where our cattle used to graze once, were claimed by new hutments. The village Banyan tree that inspired me once to scribble a rhyme a few years ago, stood in the same meditative stance. It was like the emblem of this small panchayat village of Jahidpur. The lush green rice fields rolled out like an unending carpet, and the calm forests of Sal trees, were still working like before, sustaining harmony between the villagers and the villagey flora. As I stood by our maternal house, there was no one to wait at the doorsteps except a hot zephyr blowing across the flapping door. Distant raucous songs of tribal singers floated haphazardly in the gale. Inside, tears rolled down my grandmother’s cheeks as I sat beside her. Once an active homemaker, her activities have long left the earth. She lied on her cot, half paralyzed after a massive stroke. I took a chair beside her and waited to be kissed once again. She could hardly get up but held my hands tightly, perhaps reminiscing about the love between us. Inside the house — empty, forsaken rooms lied in the same condition as hers, extending their disguised hands in love for the boy who grew up in their lap. 

While waiting for my grandpa at the front door of the house, I saw him walking down to me — still strong in his nineties. With his traditional thick glassed specs, he hugged me, and I could feel the joy in his smiling wrinkles. Just when I was about to leave, his poignant lips moved, pointing at the Banyan tree — “The age of this strangler fig cannot be concluded in numbers, but figuratively it can be said, that it has been a witness to several rises and falls in the haunting darkness of village and the prop roots hanging from its branches seem to be erected in remembrances of those trees which have ceased to exist, owing to our incurable interests. She is nature herself, and so is her age — unknown and uncountable.” It started drizzling outside and I was still missing something, when he suddenly kissed me on my forehead and continued, “This village is backward, devoid of urban features, but backwardness doesn’t imply stagnancy. Places as such, give you the much coveted space to lift your eyes toward the unending universe lit by constellations. And, don’t worry much about us — Death is just a change of phase. You knew nothing of life inside your mother’s womb, and similarly we know nothing about after-life in our present state. But, it is there. It has to be there.”

While driving back home, frequent breezes ripe with petrichor seemed to embrace and kiss me through my car window. Silence does whisper stories; sometimes it shows and sometimes it tells. Perhaps it was happy being able to inspire me, to take interest in the insignificantly significant kisses on my forehead.


Sonnet Mondal is an Indian poet and editor-in-chief of the Enchanting Verses Literary Review. Winner of the 2016 Gayatri Gamarsh Memorial award for literary excellence, Sonnet was one of the featured authors of the Silk Routes project of the International Writing Program, University of Iowa, from 2014 to 2016. Mondal has read at the Struga Poetry Evenings, Macedonia, 2014, Uskudar International Poetry Festival, Istanbul, 2015, International Poetry Festival of Granada, Nicaragua, 2016, Ars Poetica Festival, Slovakia, 2016 and Cork International Poetry Festival, Ireland, 2017. His recent works have appeared in the World Literature TodayIrish ExaminerPalestine ChronicleIndian Literature, and Asia Literary Review.

Shahé Mankerian

Continuum

Only the drunkard in the cardboard
box burns alive after the last blast. 
The taxi driver tapes the cracked 

windshield and offers the priest 
a ride across the bridge. The butcher 
recognizes the scorching smell of flesh 

but returns to pound chicken breasts 
with a mallet. The grandmother 
with a Kalashnikov strapped 

over her shoulder continues to roast 
sunflower seeds. Four truant boys 
resume their game of marbles 

under the scarred mulberry tree. 
Blood drips from the hummingbird’s 
beak as the humdrum traffic builds. 

The baker with a garden hose clears 
the pile of ashes, scattered fingernails, 
melted rubber soles.  


Shahé Mankerian is the principal of St. Gregory Hovsepian School in Pasadena and the co-director of the L.A. Writing Project. He is the recipient of the Los Angeles Music Center’s BRAVO Award, which recognizes teachers for innovation in arts education. In 2016, Mankerian’s poem was a finalist at the Gotham Writers 91-Word Memoir Contest, and the Altadena Poetry Review nominated him for the Pushcart Prize. Recently, Shahé received the 2017 Editors’ Prize from MARY: A Journal of New Writing.

Sanjida Yasmin

trust issues

fireflies offer candles &
the night knows that but you         
you shiver when my papillae tastes    
your fibrous roots from Karachi, Pakistan               
& yet, you beg for more

the lavender orchids on your verandah          
reminds me of the thick violet blood        
blood my brothers shed the night of March 25th 1971
to win independence against you 

& yet, here you are, wooing a Bengali with your
sultry Urdu words, slinky movements of your tongue

& here I am, wooed

pushing you- pulling you in Bangla
you begin to think you have me
    
kuttar baccha, I don’t trust you.


Sanjida Yasmin is a Bengali American storyteller and poet whose work explores South Asian traditions, transient movements from East to West, and most importantly, the mystery of time. Raised in the Bronx, NY, she graduated from The City College of New York where she wrote her MFA thesis on the senescence of mortals. She is a writer by night, lecturer by day. 

Jennifer Martelli

After JFK’s Assassination, (Kitty Genovese Was Murdered) Things Got Really Bad

Why are you writing about her?

                   Kitty puts things in order for me, things I thought I’d forgotten:

Do you miss those things? 
            
                   all the earth tones. I try to describe the color of blood: copper and
                   baked red, my front steps, bricks, terra cotta. Kitty Genovese was
                   menstruating that night, the Kotex was held in place with the garter straps,
                   how my mother showed me. It was in his way but 

How does Kitty order things?

                   she was not his first. He burnt the first one: lit a chiffon scarf on fire and
                   stuck it up there inside of her. He made sure he burnt her there and no one
                   knew who did this to poor Annie Mae Johnson because she was black,
                   and Kitty was white. He burnt the first one before she was even
                   dead. My mother

Do you miss your mother? What she told you?

                   said she would lose her mind if me or my sisters died
                   before she did, told me never to talk that way but I feared she
                   would die before me. I feared it and she did die before me. She had
                   a turban: sheer ecru that only showed her black window’s peak
                   she wore it to be dressy and when she’d come home it smelled like
                   menthol Trues. Kitty’s mother’s heart was broken. She couldn’t
                   walk down the aisle in the church past the people in the wooden
                   pews. She wasn’t told about her daughter’s deflated lungs or how he
                   flung the Kotex to the corner of the vestibule. She wouldn’t ever go
                   back to Queens not even for the ’64 World’s Fair. But I feel like I 

 
How does Kitty order things?

                   remember the big TVs in Almy’s Department Store, two whole aisles of
                   RCAs built into wooden consoles and the antennae like antlers and
                   everybody was silent or crying. One woman said we’re glued here we’re
                   glued to the TV. They said they killed the President because he was
                   catholic. My mother held my hand. I didn’t know what that meant. I was
                   afraid, my mother was crying. We went home and she made me sit on the
                   terra cotta front steps of our new ranch home. She gave me
                   something sweet and cold. My mother

Why are you writing about her?
            
                   looked beautiful in her chiffon turban. 

                   She had a tin ashtray from the ’64 World’s Fair in Queens.

                   I saw a burnt out building with Kitty’s face 
                   spray painted on the old baked brick. Block words
                   circled her like a halo: what is true? who will tell?


Jennifer Martelli’s debut poetry collection, The Uncanny Valley, was published in 2016 by Big Table Publishing Company. She is also the author of the chapbook Apostrophe (Big Table) and the chapbook After Bird (Grey Book Press). Her work has appeared in Thrush[PANK]Glass Poetry JournalThe Heavy Feather Review, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal. Jennifer has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net Prizes and is the recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant in Poetry. She is a book reviewer for Up the Staircase Quarterly, as well as a co-curator for The Mom Egg VOX Blog Folio

Richard Jeffrey Newman

Thank You For Thinking It

My father swore by his second wife’s liver,
cut thin, fried with onions,
seasoned he-didn’t-know-how,
but it just about melted in your mouth, he said.
I slouched silent in the front seat.
My brother made no sound in the back.
Liver was, would always be,
the inch thick slab of blood red meat
our stepfather forced us once to eat with him

and here,

in the span of the breath you are half holding,
the white space of this stanza break
where you predict what comes next,
the possible violence
George did to us
when we tried to refuse
what he put on our plates
is almost as palpable to you
as this pen in my hand is to me,

but the truth is
I have no memory of that meal,
except that the cow’s organ
made me gag.


As a poet and essayist, Richard Jeffrey Newman’s work explores the impact of feminism on his life as a man. As a co-translator of classical Persian poetry, he writes about the impact of that cannon on our contemporary lives. His most recent books are For My Son, A Kind of Prayer (Ghostbird Press 2016) and the translation The Teller of Tales: Stories from Ferdowsi’s Shahameh (Junction Press 2011). He is also the author of The Silence of Men (Cavankerry Press 2006) and Selections from Saadi’s Gulistan and Selections from Saadi’s Bustan (Global Scholarly Publications, 2004 & 2006). A new book of poems, Words for What Those Men Have Done, is forthcoming later this year from Guernica Editions. Newman is on the executive board of Newtown Literary, a Queens, NY-based literary non-profit and curates the First Tuesdays reading series in Jackson Heights, NY. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in a wide range of publications, including Salon.com, The American VoiceAnother Chicago MagazinePrairie SchoonerDiodeNew Verse NewsUnlikely StoriesCipherEkleksographia, and Dirty Goat. He is Professor of English at Nassau Community College in Garden City, NY, where he also serves as secretary of his faculty union, The Nassau Community College Federation of Teachers (NCCFT). His website is richardjnewman.com.

Khadija Anderson

The Best Husband

Malik was married when he was 13 to a woman in her 30’s. Since men aren’t allowed to choose their own wives, Malik’s mother found her through distant family members. You could say Malik and Ayesha were cousins, but that would be a stretch. 

Malik was confused at the announcement that he would be married to someone he had only met once, especially since he had read that The Prophet had said people had the choice to turn down a potential spouse if they didn’t want to marry them. Malik asked his mother about this and she said “I know what is best for you sweet-cheeks, especially when it comes to marriage.” End of discussion. 

On his wedding day, Malik was dressed in lovely white clothing, his hair was done, and his father applied kohl to his large brown eyes. The Imam was dressed in a flowing green, heavily embroidered, loose gown with a gold hijab and she conducted the marriage ceremony in the front of the mosque with all the women while Malik and his friends waited in the men’s area behind a screen in the basement of the mosque. 

Malik and his friends had long since given up on talking to their mothers about being separated into a different area of the mosque from the women. Their mothers all agreed that all they ever did was gossip and watch the younger children, they didn’t even really need to go there to pray so why give up valuable space in the main room? The fact that men during the time of The Prophet had been allowed in the same room as the women worshippers and also had their concerns answered by The Prophet directly seemed not to matter. Times had changed since those legendary Camelot-like days. Besides, their mothers told them that real men preferred to sit in another area of the mosque away from the lustful eyes of the women.

Malik’s bride Ayesha wore a gorgeous, expensive navy blue traditional gown with white hijab. Her gold bangles and rings sparkled and shone. She looked every bit the powerful yet pious woman that she was. The Imam asked what mahr she was giving Malik. She giggled and said she had purchased a new bedroom suite and set of cookware for her husband. A man’s place is in the home and Malik would be expected to keep the house clean and perform his husbandly duties in the bedroom when requested by his wife. If Ayesha was ever unsatisfied with Malik for any reason whatsoever, she could divorce him instantly merely by uttering “Talaq, Talaq, Talaq!”, “I divorce you” three times. 

Malik was not told that he could stipulate a request for divorce in his marriage contract, it was the law in the country in which they lived, but no matter – even though it was legal, not many Imams would grant a divorce to a man even if there was a serious problem. The men would be told to have patience (even with various degrees of domestic abuse) as this was a test from God and those with great patience would go to heaven.

Next, the Imam went down the 2 flights of stairs to the men’s basement area to have Malik sign the wedding contract. It was a simple form and specified that Malik could keep the mahr if Ayesha divorced him. He signed the paper in his curly middle-school writing, completing it with a heart dotting the “i” in his name, while his friends did their best to hold in their emotions at the thought of Malik’s upcoming wedding night. Malik however was not so ecstatic. From the time he was told he would be married, Malik searched all the Islamic doctrine he could find, especially the Qur’an, yet he could find nothing to validate these practices except keeping the mahr after divorce. Malik asked his mother about these inconsistencies and she said, “Men are not as fully understanding of the world stud-muffin, it is a wife’s job to guide her husband and I am sure Ayesha will do just that.” End of discussion.

On the way to the wedding banquet, the Imam congratulated the couple and reminded Malik that the best husband is the one who is quiet and guards his modesty. 


Khadija Anderson—Muslim, Anarchist, and mother (not necessarily in that order)—returned to her hometown of Los Angeles after 18 years exile in Seattle. Khadija’s poetry has been published in Angel City ReviewMobiusSwitched-on GuttenbergAbout Place, and many other online and print journals and anthologies. Her poem “Islam for Americans” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her first book of poetry, History of Butoh was published in 2012. 

Gay Degani

Locomotion

As the 7:05 rattles behind our trailer park, the cuckoo pops from his wooden house, and you stomp in from the bedroom, clutching Baby upside down against your chest. She knows this isn’t play.

You are Godzilla, crackling in primal celluloid. When I say, “Don’t hurt her,” you turn Technicolor, Kansas into Oz, all saturated purples and red, hi-fidelity loud, and call me whore. 

I drop forks and spoons and knives back into the dishwater. Turn toward you. The walls thump in and out. 

“Let me have her. Please,” I beg.

You brandish teeth, your nostrils bloom. Your anger shakes the air.

I slip my hands beneath her arms to pull her free. My child, crushed between us, whimpers.

You let go, surprising me, her weight a sudden burden. I dive to catch her, you collapsing with us to the cracked linoleum floor, hissing in my ear, and then the knife I didn’t drop, answers, and you go grainy black and white in the fading light.

The cuckoo bird retreats, the train is gone.


Gay Degani is the author of a full-length collection of short stories, Rattle of Want (Pure Slush Press, 2015), and a suspense novel, What Came Before (Truth Serum Press, 2016). She’s had four flash pieces nominated for Pushcart consideration and won the 11th Glass Woman Prize. She blogs at Words in Place.

Daniel Hudon

Thinking of the Bramble Cay Melomys

Perhaps it thrived for awhile 
in the minds of scientists 
who thought, I wonder 
how it’s faring on that tiny atoll
with the waves surging so high,
rolling over the cay, traveling so far
inland, flooding the myriad caves
and hiding places. Does it still forage
for its favorite succulent, thieve a few
turtle eggs while sneaking past the shorebirds? 
How can it be faring on that shrinking island? 

And so they travel to the island
to test the reality with cameras and traps,
hope to glimpse its long mosaic tail,
reddish-brown fur and small ears,
catch a few for a captive breeding program,
save it from forever.  And as each day passes,
the waves roll over the cay 
and the water floods the myriad caves 
and hiding places, the wind grinds the island,
parches the vegetation, so that the cay
waxes and wanes in size and shape,  
and the scientists become more 
and more depressed: the cameras
reveal nothing and the traps catch nothing
so they report, “No tracks were seen and no
scat was discovered.” 

When they bring their
cameras and traps home empty 
they think of the windswept cay, 
the surging waves that inundate the tiny island, 
and the shorebirds and turtles that nest there. 


Daniel Hudon is the author of the new book about the biodiversity crisis, Brief Eulogies for Lost Animals: An Extinction Reader (Pen and Anvil). He works as an adjunct lecturer in astronomy and math. Originally from Canada, he now lives in Boston, MA. More of his writing can be found at his website danielhudon.com, and you can follow him on Twitter @daniel_hudon.

Christopher Bolin

Immersion Data

and teams deployed to dye-test the lakes’
high-water marks 

               and dye the egrets’ legs and egrets’ necks 
the color of the sky 
               to say we lost them in migration or in 

migration films; 
               and teams to document 

the language camps, and the children
in costumes

which would not catch 
                              on machines, in foreign factories;
                              or to document the children

not drowning                              to the calling 
                              of their Christian names; 

and teams crossing each lake 
to use the islands 

as memorials 

               of the mainland; 


Christopher Bolin’s first book, Ascension Theory, was a Foreword Reviews Book of the Year Award finalist, and his next book is forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press, in 2018.  He has published poems in jubilatConduitPost Road, Lana TurnerHyperallergic, and other journals, and has held fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the James A. Michener Foundation, and the University of Iowa. Christopher teaches at the College of St. Benedict / St. John’s University, in Minnesota.