Monkey Subdues the WhiteBoned Demon

Estill Pollock Monkey Subdues the WhiteBoned Demon

Pussy Riot whipped in Sochi

they leap pogo

by Winter Olympics’ hoarding singing Putin will free the motherland haha cossacks wade in pepper spray Nadezhda beat her with a crop she yelps Putin

where are our freedoms federation thugs now beating the others wrenching arms a guitar kicked across the pavement but wouldn’t break Nadya’s friend at the crowd’s edge unnoticed taps his iPhone app pings to Youtube everyone everywhere so quick goons still smirking as a million watch in the throne room Putin says white as bones these games are mine

Nadya blinks through acid tears singing Putin where are our freedoms singing

our lives are in the cloud

Contributors

Sabrina Bertsch received her Bachelor of Art in photography in 1999 after an impressive student career including national publication in both her photography and poetry, receiving the highly prestigious Marjorie DeFriece Scholarship for excellence in art among other visual arts scholarships and exhibits. After years spent living in Philadelphia, New Mexico, Tennessee, and Virginia, Sabrina currently resides in New Jersey. She is completing her Master’s of the Art of Teaching while working on her first biographical work concerning her daughter’s depression as well as a new series of self-portraits that deal with her personal emotional conflicts.

John Brantingham is an English professor and the director of the creative writing program at Mt. San Antonio College, Walnut, California, the writer-in-residence at the dA Center for Cultural Arts, Pomona, California, an instructor at the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts, and the president of the San Gabriel Valley Literary Festival. He has published hundreds of poems and short stories in the United States and abroad. His books include the poetry collection, The Green of Sunset, and the short story collection, Let Us All Pray Now to Our Own Strange Gods.

Nancy Dillon has an MFA in Sculpture, and works as a web developer.You can find her at medium.com/@nasin where she publishes personal essays and other non-fiction work.

Bethany Fitzpatrick has an MA from the University of Arkansas where she studied English literature, creative writing, and ecofeminism. She has had poems published in Exposure, Babel fruit, and Cliterature. She

has published nonfiction online for Mothering magazine. She lives in northwest Arkansas where she teaches English Composition, gardens, and raises two delightful children.

Emily Frankenberg is an American writer and English teacher residing in Seville, Spain. She writes in both English and Spanish. Her work is forthcoming in Strong Verse and Typehouse Literary Magazine. She was also chosen as a finalist in the poetry contest held by Editorial Zenú (Colombia).

In addition to being a loving father and husband, Aaron Gansky is a novelist, teacher, and founder and editor of The Citron Review, an online literary journal. In 2009, he earned his MFA in Fiction at the prestigious Antioch University of Los Angeles, one of the top five low-residency writing schools in the nation. He is the author of the novel The Bargain (2013, Lighthouse Publishing of the Carolinas) as well as Firsts in Fiction: First Lines and (with Diane Sherlock) Write to Be Heard. His first YA fantasy novel is due out in February of 2015 from Brimstone Fiction.

Michael Gentry lives and works in Eastern Idaho. He received a B.S. in English Education from Brigham Young University-Idaho, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from National, and an Ed.D. in Education from the University of Idaho. Michael teaches basic writing courses at BYU-Idaho. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Animal Literary Magazine, The Casserole, and Outside In Literary and Travel Magazine.

Tim Hatch’s poetry has been published in Creepy Gnome, MungBeing, East Jasmine Review, The Pacific Review, The Vehicle, Touch: The Journal Of Healing, and he is the recipient of the 2014 Felix Valdez Award. He lives inside a volcano carved into the calcified bark of an ancient redwood tree, and he finds writing about himself in the third person to be an overtly seductive invitation to tell lies. He has a dog.

Holly Jensen’s work had appeared in Pank Magazine, Pear Noir! and the Midwest Quarterly. “Selected Timelines: Past and Future” is forthcoming from Neon Books. She lives in Cleveland.

Pepper Jones is a philosophy student at EKU, whose hobbies include photography and creative writing. She believes that the greatest and most beautiful art is found not in museums, but in the world around us. She lives in Kentucky with her husband, Bryan, and their two cats, Po and LK.

Sheng Kao is a sixteen year old poet. Words have been her companion for over a decade. Sheng lives in southwest Virginia with a queer pantheon of friends, constantly dreaming but never sleeping.

Clyde Kessler lives in Radford, Virginia, with his wife Kendall and their son Alan. Famous Last Words comes from a manuscript that he’s been working on for 15 years. Additional poems from this manuscript have been published in magazines such as Cortland Review and Big River, and most recently in Now and Then, Sow’s Ear, Decades Review, and San Pedro River Review.

Robert Laughlin lives in Chico, California. His “Men at Work” stories will be collected for book publication at a later date. Apart from the “Men at Work” series, Mr. Laughlin has published over 100 short stories, two of which are story South Million Writers Award Notable Stories. His website is at www.pw.org/content/ robert_laughlin

Kristin Laurel is employed as an ED nurse and flight nurse. She owes her passion to poetry to The Loft Literary Center where she has been taking writing classes for the past eight years and completed a twoyear immersion program in poetry. Recent publications can be seen in CALYX, The Raleigh Review, The Mom Egg, Grey Sparrow, Lake Region Review among others. Her first full-length book, Giving Them All Away, won the Sinclair Poetry Prize from Evening Street Press.

Dan Leach was born in Greenville, SC, graduated from Clemson University in 2008, and taught in Charleston until 2014 when he relocated to Nebraska. His short fiction has appeared in The New Madrid Review, Deep South Magazine, Two Bridges Review, Storm Cellar, Drafthorse, and elsewhere. His poetry has appeared in Off the Coast, Star 82 Review, SN Review, and elsewhere. He is currently at work on his first novel.

Jae Lee is a student currently attending New York University and has never been published before, but has have won a number of creative writing and poetry awards in the past.

Kimberly McClintock is the recipient of a Larry Levis Post-Graduate Fellowship from Warren Wilson College’s MFA Alumni Association. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in: Glassworks, Bird’s Thumb, Mountain Gazette, Chatahoochee Review, The Poet’s Attic and Wazee. After many years by the ocean in New Jersey and a few around the corner from Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, Kimberly currently resides on the Front Range in Colorado.

Esther McPhee is a genderqueer writer, magic-maker and collective organizer, who lives in a cozy collective house and reads a lot of kids books. They co-organize a queer reading series on unceded Coast Salish land

Jay Merill is published in the current issues of Anomalous Press, Citron Review, Corium and SmokeLong Quarterly. Stories have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Night Train, Spork, Eunoia Review, The Legendary, Blue Lake Review and Vine Leaves Press. Jay is the author of two short story collections – Astral Bodies (Salt, 2007) and God of the Pigeons (Salt, 2010) and has been nominated for the Frank O’Connor Award. Her story ‘As Birds Fly’ won the Salt Short Story Prize and is included in the ‘Salt Anthology of New Writing, 2013.’ She has an award from Arts Council England and is Writer in Residence at Women in Publishing.

Jim Neal was born to a gravedigger and a housekeeper and raised on the banks of a muddy, man-made lake in rural Missouri. He is the author of Farewell to Hot Water, a novel published under the cooperative model of The People’s Ink, an independent writers’ community. Jim lives in Portland, Oregon, with my wife and young daughter.

Jim O’Leary has been writing for fifteen years. His venue is the short story, and he pares his stories down as much as possible so they will be true and accurate.

A.N. Padrón is an undergraduate Creative Writing student at Florida State University.

Danielle Pappo is a poet and an aspiring teacher living on Capitol Hill in Seattle.

Matthew David Perez is a writer and whale enthusiast, as well as a graduate of the University of Washington’s MFA program. He lives in Seattle.

Dave Petraglia has appeared in Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Better Homes & Gardens; more recently in Agave, Apeiron Review, Cactus Heart, Crack the Spine, Dark Matter, eFiction India, Far Enough East, Gravel, Loco, Olivetree Review, Petrichor Review, Prick of the Spindle, Storyacious, Thought Catalog, theNewerYork, and Vine Leaves. He’s a writer and photographer and lives near Jacksonville, Florida. His blog is at www. drowningbook.com

Cal Louise Phoenix is an undergraduate student and tutor at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas. Some of her hobbies include watching British period dramas, cooking, and stirring socially-conscious debate. Her poetry has most recently been featured in FLARE, Inscape, and seveneightfive.

Estill Pollock’s publications include the book cycles Blackwater Quartet (Kittiwake 2005) and Relic Environments Trilogy (Cinnamon Press 2011). Recent anthology contributions include Sylvia is Missing (Flarestack Poets 2013) and Newspaper Taxis: Poetry after the Beatles (Seren 2013).

J.C. Reilly is author of the chapbook La Petite Mort and a 25% co-author of a recent collection of occasional poetry, On Occasion: Four Poets, One Year. Her work has recently appeared in Kentucky Review, Fly Over Country Review, Dirty Chai, and Deltona Howl. She lives in Atlanta with her husband, three cats, and a sticky-fingered ghost.

John Roth is currently enrolled as a first year student in the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program. His poems have appeared in The Orange Room Review, The Eunoia Review, Toasted Cheese, and Bird’s Thumb, among others.

Ray Scanlon. Massachusetts boy. Has grandchildren. Extraordinarily lucky. Recovering assembly language programmer. Not averse to litotes. No MFA. No novel. No extrovert. Twitter: @oldmanscanlon. On the web: http://read.oldmanscanlon.com/

Carol Shillibeer lives on the west coast of Canada. Her publication list and contact information is at carolshillibeer.com.

Kasey Thornton is an aspiring writer seeking an MFA in Creative Writing from UNCWilmington. Kasey was born and raised in North Carolina.

Emily Claire Utley is earning her MFA in Creative Writing through Carlow University. She lives and works in North Carolina.

Charles Thielman: Born and raised in Charleston, S.C., moved to Chicago, educated at red-bricked universities and on city streets, I have enjoyed working as a social worker, truck driver, city bus driver and enthused bookstore clerk. Married on a Kauai beach in 2011, a loving Grandfather for five free spirits, my work as Poet, Artiste and shareholder in an independent Bookstore’s collective continues! Several of my paintings and drawings are, or have been, featured in galleries and cafes. All that I perceive becomes driftwood fed to the kiln of my creativity.

Emily Wong is a writer/editor in Chicago, where she spends her time investigating deviations at a pharmaceutical company and playing fetch with her one-eyed Shih Tzu, Gatsby. She is pleased to say that, a mere eight years after receiving her MFA in poetry, she has finally found her voice.

Kathleen Woods is an MFA candidate at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she teaches and serves as the assistant editor for Timber Journal. Her work has appeared in Art Faccia, Paragraphiti, Paper Tape, and Cavalcade Literary Magazine.

FEATURING

SABRINA BERTSCH / JOHN BRANTINGHAM / NANCY DILLON / BETHANY FITZPATRICK EMILY FRANKENBERG / AARON GANSKY / MICHAEL GENTRY / TIM HATCH HOLLY JENSEN / PEPPER JONES / SHENG KAO / CLYDE KESSLER / ROBERT LAUGHLIN KRISTIN LAUREL / DAN LEACH / JAE LEE / KIMBERLY MCCLINTOCK / ESTHER MCPHEE LISA MEGRAW / JAY MERILL / JIM NEAL / JIM O’LEARY / TOBIAS OGGENFUSS A.N. PADRÓN / DAVE PETRAGLIA / CAL LOUISE PHOENIX / ESTILL POLLOCK / J.C. REILLY JOHN ROTH / RAY SCANLON / CAROL SHILLIBEER / KASEY THORNTON EMILY CLAIRE UTLEY / CHARLES THIELMAN / EMILY WONG / KATHLEEN WOODS