I’ve decided to kill my son. This is not a new thought. It did not come to me overnight. I’ve nursed it for a long time like an actual thing, a child that was a seedling first and then a sprout, but the idea has taken hold.
IN THE EVENT OF FULL DISCLOSURE
by Cynthia Atkins
CW Books, 95 pages
reviewed by Arya F. Jenkins
Questions about the past, memory and legacy interlink with everyday images that haunt the reader in Cynthia Atkins’s second volume of poetry, In the Event of Full Disclosure. Atkins’s poems arch into a tree extending way beyond herself, into family, society, and community, while inviting the reader to share in her concerns. If there is wholeness and power to be achieved, the poet seems to be saying, it is recognizing one’s humanness and interconnectedness…
Michelle Dominique Burk, Morning With Cane Corsos & Any Poem Can be a Love Poem…, is originally from Northern Virginia and received her MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in various publications including Cooper Street, Contrary Magazine, Boston Review, Narrative, LitHub, and Bat City Review. She currently lives in Houston, Texas where she is a fourth year PhD Fellow in the University of Houston’s Literature and Creative Writing Program. Jessica Cuello, Force: 2nd Grade, is the author of Pricking (Tiger Bark Press, 2016) and Hunt (The Word Works, 2017). She has been awarded The 2017 CNY Book Award (for Pricking), The 2016 Washington Prize (for Hunt), The New Letters Poetry Prize, a Saltonstall Fellowship, and most recently, The New Ohio Review Poetry Prize. Her newest poems are forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Cave Wall, Bat City Review, Pleiades, and Salamander. † Allison Dreier, Daisy’s Boy, is a rising junior at the …chop! chop! read more!
†Marie Baleo, Five Stars (Flash). Marie Baleo is a French writer born in 1990. Her work was nominated for a Best of the Net award in 2017 and has appeared or is forthcoming in Tahoma Literary Review, Litro Magazine, Maudlin House, Split Lip Magazine, Cease, Cows, Gone Lawn, The Penn Review, Jersey Devil Press, The Nottingham Review, Five 2 One Magazine, Hypertext Magazine, Five on the Fifth, Spilled Milk, and elsewhere. She is currently on the masthead of Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel. Marie grew up in Norway and Lebanon and received a B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis and an M.A. from Sciences Po Paris. Tina Barr, Tock Tank (Poetry). Tina Barr’s third full-length book, Green Target, won the 2017 Barrow Street Press Book Prize, judged by Patricia Spears Jones, and is forthcoming in Fall, 2018. Her poem “Green” appeared in Cleaver’s Issue 18; “Pot of Gold” appeared in Issue 13. . Curtis Bauer, In Honor of …chop! chop! read more!
I carried my persona
in a brown paper bag. It held
shreds of lint and one hair
that the comb forgot—My persona
has a pecking order. Its first name
rhymes with self—Always the last in line.
My persona is filled with
yearning. It shipped off on a garbage
of barge, and landed with a din in
the Witness Protection Program.
My persona hid under a shamrock
in DUMBO—My mural penned
by a black gloved hand. It lay chalk flat
on a red brick building,
mixed with saliva, turpentine,
and cheap wine. My persona is not
Kirsten Aguilar (The Death of a Baby, Creative Nonfiction) was born and raised in Sonoma, California. She graduated from Middlebury College in 2014 with a degree in international studies and now lives in Chicago. Most recently, her fiction has appeared in The Boiler Journal. Diane Arieff (God: User Reviews, Fiction) was born and raised in Wisconsin. She earned her M.F.A. at Warren Wilson College. Her essays and fiction have appeared in The Milwaukee Journal, The Jewish Journal, The World is a Narrow Bridge, and elsewhere. She lives and teaches in Los Angeles. Follow her on Twitter @DianeArieff Poems by Cynthia Atkins (My Persona, Poetry) have appeared or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, American Letters & Commentary, BOMB, Caketrain, Clementine, Del Sol Review, Denver Quarterly, Harpur Palate, Hermeneutic Chaos, The Journal, North American Review, Tampa Review, Valparaiso Review, and Verse Daily, among others. Her second collection, In The Event of Full Disclosure, was recently featured …chop! chop! read more!