THE FISH ROTS

by Bruce Bennett

“Since when do Republicans care more about criminals in jail than the cops who put them there? Since when do they coddle domestic terrorists? Since Donald T***p. A new report in The Daily Beast shows how the fish rots from the big orange head.” —Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, July 31, 2021

How many hurt? How many dead? 

How many at that rotten core? 

The fish rots from the big orange head. 

 

How many let themselves be led 

by what they rightly should abhor? 

How many hurt? How many dead? 

 

What was it that he did and said? 

What is it that they now ignore? 

The fish rots from the big orange head. 

 

Who should have been in jail instead 

of causing riots most deplore? 

How many hurt? How many dead? 

 

How long are we to suffer dread 

as he pursues his sick, sick war? 

The fish rots from the big orange head 

 

Whose stink continues still to spread 

through regions none can now restore. 

How many hurt? How many dead? 

The fish rots from the big orange head! 

Bruce Bennett is the author of ten books of poetry and more than thirty poetry chapbooks. His most recent full-length book is Just Another Day in Just Our Town: Poems New and Selected, 2000-2016 (Orchises Press, 2017). He was a co-founder and served as an editor of the literary journals Field and Ploughshares. From 1973 until his retirement in 2014, he taught Literature and Creative Writing at Wells College, and is now Emeritus Professor of English. In 2012 he was awarded a Pushcart Prize.

GASLIGHTS

by Jeremy Nathan Marks

Above: In a scene from Gaslight (1944), Brian (Joseph Cotton) demonstrates to Paula (Ingrid Bergman) that her husband has been lying to her in an attempt to drive her crazy. It is the title of this drama that gives us the word that describes the Big Trumplican Lies. 

We need mo’ body armor, Mo

We need the Man on the line, Jim

Andrew, the Shaman says he used Carlson

Wagonlit to book his trip which is proof that

 

It was a tourist visit.

 

Kevin says, Elise, you take it

610,000 examples and it’s up to you

to suggest each one’s fakin’ it

 

We’re setting up an audit

and they’re all gonna turn up

in the same valley of dry bones

where Ezekiel hid the ballots  

Tucker and Laura gonna move the jam

while Sean will provide cover 

urging our supporters to get

 

The jab.  

Jeremy Nathan Marks lives in Canada. Recent work appears/is appearing in As It Ought To Be, Unlikely Stories, Bluepepper, The Journal of Expressive Writing, Sledgehammer Lit, The Pangolin Review, Every Day Fiction, Ginosko Review, Dissident Voice, 365 Tomorrows, and New Reader Magazine. His full length collection Fat Dogs and Amorous Insects is being published by Alien Buddha Press this fall. 

ANY QUESTIONS?

by Clyde Always

Beware “the Delta”—COVID’s spawn

and, coming soon : “the Epsilon”

(Cyrillic once the Grecian’s gone).

  So, be you willing-to or not,

  you’ll get your monthly booster shot.

 

But, if the needle makes you flinch,

then drop your muzzle just an inch

and brace to feel the slightest pinch…

  Bi-weekly this procedure goes:

  we jam a Q-tip up your nose.

 

If still ill-motives you presume

we’ll lock you in a padded room

where daily lectures via ZOOM

  we hope may help you yet to learn

  your health’s our only real concern.

Clyde Always is an accomplished cartoonist, poet, painter, novelist and Vaudevillian entertainer. His writings and/or illustrations have been printed in the Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, Light, Slackjaw, Scarfff Comics, etc. etc. You can see his storytelling act, live and in-person, any Friday evening, at the Scott Street Labyrinth in San Francisco, CA.

D IS FOR DELTA

by Mary K O'Melveny

In math, Delta means change.

An isosceles triangle points the way

to changes in quantity:

  more sick

  more hospital beds

  more ventilators

  more dead

  more masks

  more six foot limits:

    apart from each other

    down in the ground.

 

Changes as in differences in.

  As in:

    yesterday there was reason to hope

    last week we went to a concert

    the airport was full of tourists

  As in:

    the rate of change is significant:

    red lines rise on graphs

    there are no lines of people seeking vaccines

    there are now some lines but not enough.

Changes as in variables.

  As in:

    yesterday I met you at a party

    today I am at the doctor’s office

    tomorrow my family will hold a zoom remembrance.

In science, Delta means a sometimes triangular mass of sediment.     

  As in:

     silt and sand lodged in a river’s mouth

     spit into the sea  or a lake  or a plain

        as in Mississippi    or Okavango   or Kalahari

     tides and waves create sandbars and dendritic silt

        as in the Nile   or the Ganges

     estuaries of brackish water form at the confluence of sea and river

        as in China’s Yellow River.

   Some Deltas become abandoned  

the rivers leave   discard their channels   dry up

   that too denotes movement   change. 

  That change is called avulsion:

    As in:

      the sudden separation of mass from one place to another

      the sudden separation of reason from the brain

      the sudden movement from reality to fantasy.

 

Delta can be a girl’s name:

   books of baby names call it appealing   chic  unique

       fit for a child of grace and distinction.

 This too will change. 

Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY.  Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals. Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age is available from Finishing Line Press. Mary’s poetry collection Merging Star Hypotheses was published by Finishing Line Press in January, 2020.

ICE CREAM ACTIVISM

by Alisha Goldblatt

after “The Emperor of Ice Cream” by Wallace Stevens

Photo: Emmanuel Dunand/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images via The New York Times.

Lick the sins of countries past,

the thrown stone, and gather your pints

in unbleached paperboard, crisp waffle cones.

Sell hazelnut play on words that

signal virtue and decadence, and

slick the tongue divine, smooth on spoon.

Let slingshots rile the bull market.

The only flavor is a flavor of fear.

In the modern white freezer, vats 

blister thumbs from the plastic scoop

whose spring-back lever neatly cleaves the ice.

The Green state, the Holstein cows, the fourteenth star.

Shirtsleeves cuffed, tough and chocolate stained

to show how cold we are, and numb.

Let the melting be violent and swift. 

The only flavor is the flavor of fear. 

Alisha Goldblatt is an English teacher and writer living in Portland, Maine with her two wonderful children and one lovely husband. She has published poems in the Common Ground Review, Literary Mama, and Burningword Literary Journal, among several others. Alisha writes whenever she can and gets published when she’s lucky. 

DRONING ON & ON & ON

by Art Goodtimes

In 2013, Daniel Hale was at an antiwar conference in D.C. when a man recounted that two family members had been killed in a U.S. drone strike. The Yemeni man, through tears, said his relatives had been trying to encourage young men to leave al-Qaeda. Hale realized he had watched the fatal attack from a base in Afghanistan. At the time, he and his colleagues in Air Force intelligence viewed it as a success. Now he was horrified. It was such experiences, Hale told a federal judge in Alexandria, Va., on Tuesday, that led him to leak classified information about drone warfare to a reporter after leaving the military. “I believe that it is wrong to kill, but it is especially wrong to kill the defenseless,” he said in court. He said he shared what “was necessary to dispel the lie that drone warfare keeps us safe, that our lives are worth more than theirs.” U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady sentenced Hale, 33, of Nashville, to 45 months in prison for violating the Espionage Act, saying his disclosure of documents went beyond his “courageous and principled” stance on drones. —Washington Post, July 27, 2021

Ironically perverse, ’inn’it

that the whistleblower descendant

of our first patriot spy Nathan Hale

who blew up the U.S. drone program

 goes to jail for four years

 

Convicted & sentenced for exposing

to the light of citizen discernment

our American guide to extrajudicial killings

& their collateral

extinguishment of innocents

 

While, feted followed & showered

with speaker fees

Bush Obama Trump Biden

go on being hailed as leaders

given awards

 

But we the people know whatever the hui

as they’d say on Kauai

with a hang-loose flash of the fist

whatever the name of the game

they gotta keep to the Free World's

bipartisan new normal

 

Mass murders on a scale outweighing all recent

incidents of personal gun violence

in the ol’ U.S. of A

 

So, on we go, in spite of lies

insurrections deceptions liberal

cant & fundraising junk mail

 

On & on. Targeting terrorists

in ever-widening circles of definition

Editor’s Note: For more on Daniel Hale, go to: the sparrow project, the intercept, and Stand With Daniel Hale.

Art Goodtimes is a Western Slope poet, former Green elected official, and constituent of Rep. Lauren Boebert in Colorado's Third Congressional.

ELEGY FOR THE LUNG

by Robert Américo Esnard

The sun streaks a dull rust 

over the Hudson, 

the dusty air shimmers metallic,

and I am overcome 

with awareness of my own blood.

 

I can feel it, not rushing, but crawling,

a slow advance. 

My whole body a fleshy host.

Incredible, 

the small power of a protein 

 

to sustain a whole body: 

to capture, 

to carry, to climb, to clear. 

We, less thankless 

more heedless. I rarely consider:

 

the shape of a fluid forms 

its function.

A tiny shift is enough to poison 

a whole body: 

to capture contagion, to carry 

 

contaminants through the blood. 

A breath of rust 

climbing as the branches burn,

a body overcome,

making a slow advance to dust.

Robert Américo Esnard was born and raised in the Bronx, NY. He studied Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Dartmouth College. His work has been published by or is forthcoming in Alternating Current Press, Alternative Field, Cutbank, Glass, Lunch Ticket, New York Quarterly, and several anthologies. He is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize-nominated poet.

THE MAN AND THE IRONIC LUNG

by Ron Riekki

It’s your coffin now —Sharon Olds, from “Satan Says” 

 

My brother says there is nothing funnier than Steven Crowder 

having a collapsed lung, and I tell him I would never use 

the word “funnier” with Steven Crowder, that only “misery” 

works with that guy, how he supposedly re-created George 

Floyd’s murder by having a guy dressed as a cop lightly 

kneel on his neck and how my brother said he’d like to kneel 

on Crowder’s neck for real, & then a few months later & he has 

a collapsed lung, how fitting, how perfectly fitting, this feeling 

that God is listening, how a thirty-four-year-old doesn’t have 

a collapsed lung from nothing, how divine that intervention is, 

the irony of all the hate that came out of Rush Limbaugh’s lungs, 

how it makes sense that he’d go that way, how words can be 

cancerous, how hate speech affects the lungs, the throat, the heart. 

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (Michigan State University Press).

POEM WITH REPEATED WORD

by Renée M. Schell    

                                    for Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles

 

What if we all practiced saying no?

 

What if every street corner

had a microphone

for the practice of saying no?

 

No, I won’t keep my mouth shut

No, I won’t choose between food and rent

No, I won’t use my body as an ATM to cross a border

 

The no’s would ring out, streaming

like ribbons up and over each other

weaving an ornate shawl

a handmade rebollo

a silk sari

a second-hand skirt

a torn scarf

 

They’d hear No in Amarillo

No in the pueblos of Mexico

No in Iowa,

No in the middle of nowhere,

No in County Kerry

No in the Sahara

No in Angola

No in Afghanistan

 

The microphones would pick

up the tiniest no,

the no of infants,

the no of eight-year-olds,

the no of a mother separated

from her child

at Fort Bliss.

 

How famous

do you have

to be 

for your no

to be

heard?

 

Renée M. Schell’s debut collection Overtones is forthcoming from Tourane Poetry Press. Her poetry appears in Catamaran Literary Reader, Literary Mama, Naugatuck River Review, and other journals. In 2015 she was lead editor for the anthology (AFTER)life: Poems and Stories of the Dead. She holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University and teaches second grade in a diverse classroom in San Jose, CA. 

UNSENT LETTER TO HIDILYN DIAZ, OLYMPIC GOLD MEDALIST

by Jonel Abellanosa

How much more weight

should you lift off our poverty

of belief, how much more heavy lifting

before we know ours is the golden

heart we lost before birth?

 

We pine, nostalgic for the home

we never knew, strangers to our own

archipelago. The beauty we see hidden

in plain sight, stolen long before

we’re old enough to question.

 

Long our memory of plunder,

recall homeless when the monsoon

season rages. We’re too preoccupied

to remember. How much the dearest

question we learn to ask, dear

 

as restless days at a high cost, heaven-high

anxiety we can’t wrap to give our children.

How much, how much more? Enslaved

to more, we open our chests, shocked

our hearts have been stolen.

 

Nor do we have the chest to live by

during months when rain drains all warmth.

How many of us don’t know you emerged

victorious against the heavy burden?

How many of us are still searching

 

for the heart that elsewhere beats

the way living in comfort beats and makes us

hear music, the pursuit of happiness

a birthright equal not just for the few?

For the shortlasting you found our hearts.

 

For a moment

wear it

like a medal

for us

all.

Jonel Abellanosa lives in Cebu City, The Philippines. His poetry and fiction are forthcoming in The Cape Rock and Poetry Salzburg Review and have appeared in hundreds of magazines including The New Verse News, Thin Air, Chiron Review, The Lyric, Poetry Kanto, and The Anglican Theological Review and have been nominated for the Pushcart, Best of the Net and Dwarf Stars prizes. His poetry collections include Songs from My Mind’s Tree and Multiverse (Clare Songbirds Publishing House, New York), 50 Acrostic Poems (Cyberwit, India), In the Donald’s Time (Poetic Justice Books and Art, Florida), and Pan’s Saxophone (Weasel Press, Texas). He is a nature lover, with three companion dogs, and three other beloved dogs who have passed on beyond the rainbow bridge. He loves all animals. 

THE BOOTLEG FIRE IS CREATING ITS OWN WEATHER

by Francine Witte

As the Bootleg fire in Southern Oregon rages on, the massive wildfire is creating its own weather systems. "The fire is so large and generating so much energy and extreme heat that it's changing the weather. Normally the weather predicts what the fire will do. In this case, the fire is predicting what the weather will do," Marcus Kauffman, a spokesman for the state forestry department, told The New York Times. —EcoWatch. Photo: A pyrocumulus cloud from the Bootleg Fire drifts into the air near Bly, Oregon on July 16, 2021. PAYTON BRUNI / AFP via Getty Images via EcoWatch.

Smokedrift and sunblot

from the fire spreading

like deathpain, the heat

so hot it spins the wind,

pinches lightning out

of the sky. Used to be

the wind would tell

the fire where to go.

 

Here in the east, we watch

the fire on TV. The silhouettes

of houses falling cardlike,

the bare hands of trees reaching up

in useless prayer. The weatherman

tells us the clouds we see

in the New York sky aren’t clouds

but smoke from out west.

 

It makes me think of other weathers,

the ones that weren’t weathers,

the storm of my father leaving so fast

the windows quaked, and then, the quiver

 

of hospitals filling up again, the rain

in the eyes of the left-behind.

The quiet drought of a man,

somewhere, shaking his head

sending the word “hoax” into the

air like a butterfly.

 

Francine Witte’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Mid-American Review, and Passages North. Her latest books are Dressed All Wrong for This (Blue Light Press), The Way of the Wind (AdHoc fiction), and The Theory of Flesh (Kelsay Books). Her chapbook The Cake, The Smoke, The Moon (flash fiction) will be published by ELJ in Fall 2021. She is flash fiction editor for Flash Boulevard and The South Florida Poetry Journal. She lives in NYC.

UP UP AND AWAY

by  Judy Juanita

Billionaires space race published July 12, 2021 by Dave Whamond.

Billionaires millionaires the amerikkkan dream

Up, up and away onto the edge of space

Horatio Alger wins again

Rags-to-riches

Poor boy sandwiches

Raggedy Ann dolls

Immigrants in shacks 

Children in cages

We love it all, eh?

Up, up and away

The bigger the better

The farther from the crime scene 

The better. And the edge of space is

The Mall of America.

Opportunity our national anthem

Except except Tulsa in 1920-when? 1921

Black people black dynasties

Black millionaires buying and flying

Their own airplanes

Black businesses black prosperity

And we prostrate ourselves

For a black face on the $20 bill

   Eh?

Ask the black Okies

About the grand downtown they built

Especially for the bombs

Dropped especially on Tulsa

Listen to the sound of bombs

The bombs bursting in air

That Francis Scott Keys conjured

Ask the black Oakies

Then forward to Philly in 1990-what? 

1990-when? 1990-why?

Because a black mayor dropped bombs

On wild haired Ramona Africa 

An American millionaire, no?

Rags to riches, no?

Horatio Alger, no?

MOVE the antithesis of progress

Cleanliness

We, the clean, deodorant-rich country

Watching  televised spectacles 

Little blue-and-white suited people

Blast past the boundary of space as

The richest man in the world

Thanks his wage slaves and customers

For paying for it all

And all is forgiven because why? Because

When the land ran into the Pacific Ocean

Manifest destiny shot into space

Judy Juanita's latest book is Manhattan My Ass, You’re In Oakland,  a collection of poetry. Her semi-autobiographical novel Virgin Soul chronicled a black female coming of age in the 60s who joins the Black Panther Party. Her collection of essays DeFacto Feminism: Essays Straight Outta Oakland examines the intersectionality of race, gender, politics, economics and spirituality as experienced by a black activist and self-described "feminist foot soldier." The collection was a distinguished finalist in Ohio State University's 2016 Non/Fiction Collection Prize. Her seventeenth play, “Theodicy,” about two black men who accidentally fall into the river of death, won first runner-up of 186 plays in the Eileen Heckart 2008 Senior Drama Competition at Ohio State University.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE NEW YORKER CARTOONS?

by Earl J. Wilcox

From the current issue of The New Yorker. 

Once, they were not just cutting edge,

They were the edge. Timely, clever,

Witty, observant of contemporary politics,

Our mores (for better or worse)—

Fresh, unique, without peers in other

Mags. (I could go on listing adjectives

Suggesting their demise, but you get the point.)

 

Was it the pandemic? A change in editors at

The storied mag? Perhaps all the good cartoonists

Died or became so out of touch or old or both

They no longer know what’s funny and what’s

Just a quaint take on our times.  I long for a return

To those good old days when The New Yorker 

Made me smile out loud at least three times

Each week. Or is it just me?

 

When did I stop seeing humor in politics and people,

In our pain and our poignant moments, our sass,

In all that’s worth seeing in human nature, even

Occasionally cruel jesting at our sores and warts,

our meanness. So many sexy innuendoes in those

Cartoons one could publish a book (as the mag’s

Editors have done several times over!) Such

Terrific and precious or precocious punch lines.

Is such pleasure taken from us forever?

Is this the way the world may end, not

With a SHAZAM but a New Yorker

Cartoon blaaah?

 

 

Earl Wilcox discovered The New Yorker cartoons about seven decades ago.

DISTANT WILDFIRES

by Geoffrey A. Landis

The map above, based on modeling from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, shows how the smoke from Western wildfires spread across the country. —The New York Times, July 21, 2021

High in the sky

the gibbous moon blushes pink—

distant wildfires.

Geoffrey A. Landis is a poet, science-fiction writer and scientist. His poetry appears in places from ArtCrimes to The Year’s Best Fantasy, and he is the author of two poetry collections: Iron Angels from VanZeno Press and The Book of Whimsy from NightBallet. In his spare time, he fences épée, because he likes to stab strangers with a sword.