The Exclusion Zone. Poems by Wayne Johns, selected by Dan Vera and Ron Mohring as Number Seven in the Rane Arroyo Chapbook Series.

Publication:  May 11, 2018 [100 copies]
32 pages
$ 9.00

Cover image: Paul Bilger, “The Procession”
https://chronotopic.weebly.com

Wayne Johns’s poems have appeared in Best New Poets, New England Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Image, and elsewhere. His previous chapbook, An Invisible Veil Between Us (Thorngate Road), received the Frank O’Hara Chapbook Award. His first collection, Antipsalms, received the Editor’s Choice Award from Unicorn Press and is forthcoming in fall 2018. 

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Heretic

Leaving The Heretic for an after-party
at Masquerade, the two of us still

wanting and awake in that city where
those who legislate such things forbid

the sale of liquor at this hour. Thus
the crush of shirtless flesh sways

within the pulse and surge,
forming and unforming

in circles. We separate,
each searching for something

long gone. I ask someone
at the door if we can go out

and come back in. Moonless
and starred, the night

nearly over. One of us–the one
no longer here–begins to sing

“How Soon Is Now?”
You shut your mouth–

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• Purchase Wayne’s chapbook here.