BY ANY OTHER NAME: SPRING TRAINING ANGST

by Earl J. Wilcox

If some kids played it on the Pittsburgh

streets with only a Wiffle ball, a crooked

stick, and one lad to keep it from the gutters.

 

If they played it on a loamy garden patch

in an Arkansas village with a ball made

from old socks around a ball of twine.

 

If kids of any age and many sizes

played the game on a sandlot

in Las Terrenas, Dominican Republic.

 

Even if the Japanese kids decided to

practice ten hours a day just to make

the team for the family’s pride.

 

If the boys of summer began practice

in winter, in a game that no longer

uses bat boys, has no fans in the stands... 

 

And if this game has no hot dogs or

peanuts and Crackerjacks and many

players wear kerchiefs and masks

 

And if they can no longer blow bubble

gum or eat pumpkin seeds or swat each

other on the butt after a terrific play.

 

And if the balls and strikes are called

by a robot squatting behind the screen

in the stands or hovering in a drone.

 

We will still call this game BASEBALL.

 

Earl Wilcox dedicates this poem to the late Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose "Baseball Canto" remains the iconic tribute to our national pastime.

THE GOLDEN CALF

by Gordon Gilbert

At CPAC.

He spoke appropriately enough

(although misspoken)

of a herd “mentality.”

He could have been speaking of

his own followers,

this super-spreader,

deliberately infecting their bodies

and their minds.

 

Now they wander in a desert of their own making,

mindless in their worship

of this golden orange-coiffed calf,

and at his bidding

they have set aside

the ten commandments,

for only one that now all must obey:

 

“Bow down

&

worship me!” 

 

Gordon Gilbert is a long time resident of the west village in NYC. He only took up writing seriously and performing his work in public in 2008. Since then, besides poetry, he has written many prose pieces (short stories, monologues, short fiction) and one play, Monologues from the Old Folks Home, which he has produced and directed eight times in the past seven years at various venues in lower Manhattan. He has hosted over a dozen programs celebrating the beat generation writers, as well as some other writers, including William Carlos Williams. Gordon is also a member of the Irish American Writers and Artists, and has occasionally hosted their bimonthly salons as well.  

THE AMERICAN VARIANT

by Pepper Trail

It has always circulated among us

We know that, and we know

Mutations happen all the time

So what makes this so virulent

So easily transmitted

Neighbor to neighbor, father to son?

 

It is airborne, that is clear

Transmitted on the breath

On the words carried on the breath

Capable of crossing great distances

Broadcast on the seething turbulence

Filling our air, our airwaves

 

Experts speak of it with awe

The terrible beauty of its design

How it targets our vulnerabilities

Binds to our fears

Produces an inflammation

Disorderly and wild

 

There are treatments

Not painless but effective

But the problem is this:

The genius of this variant

Its most deadly symptom

Is denial of the disease itself

 

And so the epidemic rages

The world waits for the crisis

For the fever to break

To burn itself out

Or to infect every last one of us

Burn everything up, at last

Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.

ILLUMINATION

by James Schwartz

500,000.

We are not equipped to process this level of grief, the news anchor sighs. Video plays of the President, First Lady, VP and Second Gentleman surrounded by candles. 

500,000.

A statistic surpassing wartime numbers. The day will come, President Biden promises, when the memory of our loved ones will bring a smile before a tear. 

500,000. 

We are an illumination in this dark stillness. One morning we will smile at the empty chair. One morning we will smile. 

James Schwartz is a poet, writer, slam performer and author of 5 poetry collections including The Literary Party: Growing Up Gay and Amish in America. Twitter: @queeraspoetry

500,000

by Cathy Hailey

Ascent and descent

Symmetrical staircases

Move candlelight bent

Flames flicker faces

Pathways towards transcendency

Spirits drifting in

Liminality

A presidential burden

Despite empathy

Comforts multitudes

In national eulogy

Church bell interludes

Ritual “Amazing Grace”

All, Requiescat en Pace

Cathy Hailey teaches as an adjunct in Johns Hopkins University’s online MA in Teaching Writing program and previously taught high school English and Creative Writing in Prince William County, VA. She is northern region vice president of The Poetry Society of Virginia and organizes In the Company of Laureates, a biennial reading of poets laureate held in PWC. Her writing has been published in Poetry Virginia, The Journal of the Virginia Writing Project, Written in Arlington, The Prince William Poetry Review, Grid Poems, and in anthologies associated with ekphrastic collaborations.

YES,

by Penelope Scambly Schott

yet another one of the poets I have known

now gone under the grass. Lawrence Ferlingetti,

at a hundred and one. I once heard him recite:

   Pity the nation whose people are sheep

   Pity the nation whose leaders are liars

and yet, how we all try

to go on walking.

Who will sell shoelaces down by the seashore?

Mine are torn.

Penelope Scambly Schott is a past recipient of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Her newest book is On Dufur Hill, poems about the cycle of the year in a small wheat-growing town.

WHALE SONG

by Barbara Parchim

Probing the structure of the ocean crust requires a wave source. The most common source is an air gun, which is effective but potentially harmful for ocean life and not easy to use everywhere. Václav M. Kuna and John L. Nábělek found that fin whale songs can also be used as a seismic source for determining crustal structure. Fin whale vocalizations can be as loud as large ships and occur at frequencies useful for traveling through the ocean floor. These properties allow fin whale songs to be used for mapping out the density of ocean crust, a vital part of exploring the seafloor. —Science, February 12, 2021

now that seismologists know

that different frequencies of whale songs

can map the layers of the ocean floor

to help us study sediment and rock

in areas where earthquakes occur—

can we pause?

 

when their beauty and sentience,

curiosity and gentleness,

is not enough—

has never been enough—

to awaken compassion

 

when the “harvest” of these giants,

some with their young alongside

does not engender adequate empathy

 

now that we have a “use”

for these beings,

for scientific research,

that requires a living, breathing, body

 

now—

can we, finally, stop the slaughter?

 

 

Barbara Parchim lives on a small farm in southwest Oregon. She enjoys gardening and hiking and volunteered for several years at a wildlife rehabilitation facility. Her poems have appeared in Ariel Chart, Isacoustic, Turtle Island Quarterly, Windfall, and Trouvaille Review. Her first chapbook, selected by Flowstone Press, will appear in 2021.

THE UNSPEAKABLE

by Sister Lou Ella

Dianna Ortiz, an American Roman Catholic nun whose rape and torture in Guatemala in 1989 helped lead to the release of documents showing American involvement in human rights abuses in that country, died on Friday in hospice care in Washington. She was 62. —The New York Times, February 20, 2021. PHOTO: Sister Dianna Ortiz in 1996. After being raped and tortured in Guatemala, she helped focus attention on the 200,000 people who were killed or disappeared during that country’s 36-year civil war. Credit: Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

           in memory of sr. dianna ortiz, osu

                         rape and torture victim

“I’m not sure what it means to forgive.”

friday after ash wednesday

2/19/2021

 

the death certificate read cancer

but i know better

the unspeakable terror

that tortured your flesh years ago

has finally had its way with you

then and then daily the Holy in your body

screamed why have you forsaken me

perhaps you are the saint of the struggle

that wrestling with the command to forgive

but the Holy will also have Its way

It too Unspeakable

Sister Lou Ella has a master’s in theology from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio and is a former teacher and librarian. She is a certified spiritual director as well as a poet and writer.  Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines such as America, First Things, Emmanuel, Third Wednesday, and The New Verse News as well as in four anthologies: The Night’s Magician: Poems about the Moon, edited by Philip Kolin and Sue Brannan Walker, Down to the Dark River edited by Philip Kolin, Secrets edited by Sue Brannan Walker and After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events edited by Tom Lombardo.  She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2017 and in 2020. Her first book of poetry entitled she: robed and wordless was published in 2015. (Press 53.)

THE NUN WAS TORTURED

by Karol Nielsen

The nun founded the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC).

The American nun, who was gang raped and tortured in Guatemala, died of cancer in Washington, DC. She had been helping indigenous Guatemalans when she was captured. The government suspected the indigenous of left wing subversion, with the United States backing the Guatemalan military in its civil war. The nun was burned by cigarettes, exposed to dead bodies and rats, and forced to mutilate another captive with a machete. She jumped out of a car as the man with accented Spanish drove her to a new location. She fled to the United States and struggled to remember her life there. She sued a Guatemalan general who was studying at Harvard. A judge ordered him to pay millions but he escaped to Guatemala. She told a reporter that even though she was Catholic she struggled to forgive.

Karol Nielsen is the author of two memoirs and two poetry chapbooks. Her first memoir was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her poetry collection was a finalist for the Colorado Prize for Poetry. 

SOME DAY, PERHAPS...

IT WILL HELP TO REMEMBER THESE TROUBLES AS WELL.*

by Bonnie Naradzay

*Aeneas to his men, after theirs is the only ship

  to survive a violent storm at sea near Carthage.

         

Friends, a study of The Black Death states the plague 

may have come from outer space. The Mars Rover 

landed in a dried up lake. Perseverance is transporting 

images home from the red planet. On earth, we learn 

that magnetic north and south may be flipping sides, 

an ominous event, according to weakening attractions 

and ancient iron shards stuck pointing the wrong way. 

In Galveston, medical workers asked for a refrigerated 

truck to store the dead bodies. Thousands of turtles 

stunned by the cold have gone to a convention center 

in the backs of station wagons. Ted Cruz got on the plane

in jeans but went the wrong way, or the optics were wrong.

Sweet Thames, and Virgil, flow gently while I end my song.

Bonnie Naradzay leads poetry workshops at a day shelter for homeless people and at a retirement center, both in Washington DC.  Recent poems are in AGNI, New Letters (Pushcart nomination), Kenyon Review Online, RHINO, Tar River Poetry, Tampa Review, Poet Lore, EPOCH, Northern Virginia Review, Anglican Theological Review, Seminary Ridge Review, and The Ekphrastic Review.

KIDNAPPING GODOT

by Richard Fox

Cartoon by Tom Gauld.

"People are bloody ignorant apes." 

—Estragon in Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

1. Polio

Mom makes pancakes for breakfast on a Wednesday.

Gives me a gorilla hug at the bus stop.

At school, we hang up coats, march to the All-Purpose Room.

The nurse smiles, watches us down cups of clear liquid. 

The principal anoints each forehead with a gold star. 

2. Cancer

Mothers quiz me about Gardasil* for daughters. 

I endure HPV*-caused tumors, 

so pegged their expert.

My plea, heed pediatricians.

Inoculate girls and boys by age eleven.

They choose to delay, let their kids ripen. 

Maybe by sixteen, the children can decide.

3. Ba’al

Carthage

the field of stones 

chiseled memorials

first born sons

throats slit

* Gardasil is a vaccine that prevents the HPV virus from causing oral and cervical cancer. Anti-vaxxers promote false research that a side effect is autism. Because HPV is spread sexually (not necessarily via intercourse), they claim the vaccine is tacit approval for teenage sex.

When not writing about rock ’n roll or youthful transgressions, Richard Fox focuses on cancer from the patient’s point of view drawing on hope, humor, and unforeseen gifts. He is the author of five poetry collections and the winner of the 2017 Frank O’Hara Prize.

A PANDEMIC PRAYER

by Roderick Deacey

Don’t let me die a COVID death

pinned and tied by wires and tubes,

felled by fear and pain,

enduring dark visions

from potions that numb and confuse,

unable to touch the infinite,

losing the inevitable tussle for breath.

Instead, let me choose a worm’s death,

gently stilling movement

in the warm black soil.

Feeling the earth shiver and move

as it wraps me in its vast body

and cradles me

in its perpetual swing around the sun.

Or let me walk into the ancient forest

and sense the slow sap of centuries

sliding through the rough bark I lean against.

Let me mark the deep rhythm of the wood

as I feel myself slowly sink

into the tree’s heart,

to rest serene among leafy limbs.

Best of all, let me die a bird’s death,

swooping and swirling

high in a star-pricked sky—

not even aware

of tumbling flesh and feathers falling

as I joyously fly on

toward that brilliant rainbow slash of dawn.

Roderick Deacey is a performing poet in the DC area, based in Frederick, MD. In normal, non-viral times, he regularly performs with his drummer/percussionist and bass-player, presenting “neo-beat” poems inspired by the Beat Poets’ poetry and jazz forays of the nineteen-fifties. His beat poetry chapbook neo-beatery ballads was published in 2019. Deacey was awarded the 2019 Frederick Arts Council Carl R. Butler Award for Literature. Crossing genres, he won the Gold Award for best lyrics in the 2020 Mid-Atlantic Song Contest held by the Songwriters Association of Washington.

WHAT IS HERE

by Mary K O'Melveny

Perseverance

has landed today

on Mars.

Curiosity will have company.

Everyone is eager for news:

Red cinnamon rocks.

Long dead grey lakes.

Dust filled grooves.

Caves chiseled into canyons

like a Henry Moore garden.

Layers of mystery

embedded in swirls of rock

marbled as a fine steak.

We are always looking

for something

to make sense of.

Something that explains

our odd and quirky selves,

the reasons we love and lose,

fight over nothing sensible,

torture and torment.

We are always looking

for history,

for memory,

for stories,

for permanence,

for renewal.

The deeper we dig,

the less happy we are.

So we fly off

to other realms

hoping to learn more

from long dead planets.

Hoping there is something

new under the sun.

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.

FAMILY VALUES LIMBO

by Chad Parenteau

Cartoon by Steve Brodner for Mother Jones, March 6, 2009.

Angry Dad is dead.

The rush is on

to see who now has

the loudest voice.

Auditions begin

at dinner table. 

Women fill glasses

from bottom to brim.

Contents spill over

on flag tablecloths.

New father figure 

finds this affront,

sets air above table

aflame, scatters dishes,

sends all to bed

without supper.

There they'll fester,

rewrite old declamation

overheard piecemeal

from fighting parents.

Chad Parenteau hosts Boston's long-running Stone Soup Poetry series. His work has appeared in journals such as Résonancee, Molecule, Cape Cod Poetry Review, Tell-Tale Inklings, Off The Coast, Ibbetson Street ,and Wilderness House Literary Review. He is a contributor to Headline Poetry & Press and serves as Associate Editor of the online journal Oddball Magazine. His second collection, The Collapsed Bookshelf, was released in 2020.

REALITY CHECK

by Marc Swan

for Jane Ferguson

Birds shriek, buildings fall,

body counts mount

in Beirut, Kabul, Baghdad,

parts of Africa, South Asia.

Where have all the flowers gone

I think in the quiet of my office

on a quiet road in a quiet village

along the coast of Maine. I try

to imagine reporting live 

from these hostile locales, 

most importantly staying alive. 

I think of a Special Correspondent

for PBS, an Irish-British journalist 

with long blond hair tucked 

under a head scarf, jeans 

and a military-style jacket

treading lost roads in leather boots

with another woman, camera in hand.

We never see her, but know

she’s shooting the footage

we’ll see on the nightly news.

In recent reports, the Taliban 

armed to the teeth 

seem more than willing to speak 

on camera as the journalist 

asks hard questions in Arabic, 

translated for us in the comfort 

of heated living spaces unaware 

of what is truly seen, heard, 

felt in places of unending conflict—

what does constant fear smell like?

Marc Swan’s latest collection all it would take was published in May 2020 by tall-lighthouse. Poems recently published or forthcoming in Gargoyle, The Stony Thursday Book, Queen’s Quarterly, MockingHeart Review.  He lives in coastal Maine with his wife Dd, an artist and yoga teacher.

AVERSION TRAINING

by Robin S. Axworthy

Photo credit: Bette Ferber via The New York Times.

I have grown used to the moisture of my own breath 

on night walks, the mask, the sound of my own breathing 

pushed up past my ears.  Used to my own company at home, 

with only husband and sometimes daughter.  Used to any other

contacts as just the glass and scratch of microphone, letters 

appearing and sorting into sense on a screen. Used to touch

as poison to be scraped clean with alcohol and friction.

Accustomed now to nearness an electric buzz of warning

away from flesh, ears so used to staccato whine they have forgotten 

rippling waterfall of open mouth, mouth forgotten how breath 

feels naked and dry, thin in the bare air, my hands so used to solitude 

they’ve forgotten how to find their way to warmth.  

Robin S. Axworthy has been published in various anthologies including, most recently, Dark Ink: An Anthology Inspired by Horror (Moon Tide Press) and Is It Hot in Here or Is It Just Me? Women Over Forty Write on Aging (Beautiful Cadaver Project). Her chapbook Crabgrass World was published in March 2020 by Moon Tide Press. 

WHAT WE LEARNED IN 2020

by Katherine West

The globe of Earth has shrunk, a small balloon

losing air sinking against the blue blue sky

to land exactly in my hand, all mine 

to know the pain of every land, all you 

and you and you, all me in mirrors new 

as stars on windy nights of sharpened light 

that cuts my chest that makes me bleed your time

cut short then so is mine the years so few 

now less the globe a shriveled wrinkled skin

I cup as gently as a fallen bird 

my own true love I carry home to bed 

I tuck you up, I slide beside so thin

we fit, an old and folded map, a world 

of continents that kiss, of coasts that wed.

 

Katherine West lives in Southwest New Mexico, near Silver City.  She has written three collections of poetry: The Bone Train, Scimitar Dreams, and Riddle, as well as one novel, Lion Tamer.  Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Writing in a Woman's Voice, Lalitamba, Bombay Gin, The New Verse News, Tanka Journal, Splash!, Eucalypt, and Southwest Word Fiesta.  The New Verse News nominated her poem "And Then the Sky" for a Pushcart Prize in 2019.  In addition she has had poetry appear as part of art exhibitions at the Light Art Space gallery in Silver City, New Mexico and at the Windsor Museum in Windsor, Colorado.  Using the name Kit West, Katherine's new novel When Night Comes: A Christmas Carol Revisited has just been released, and a selection of poetry entitled Raising the Sparks will come out in 2021, both published by Breaking Rules Publishing.  She is presently at work on the sequel to When Night Comes. It is called Slave: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Revisited. She is also an artist.

RE-ACQUITTED

by Imogen Arate

Dying stars burn the brightest

Europe's birth rate is falling

Italian towns offer abandoned 

homes on the cheap

Even in a COVID year

nearly 1-0-0-0 

wo/men and children

died on the Mediterranean

in pursuit of safety

The Sonoran took its biggest gulp

in 10 years

as desiccated remains are picked

from between its gritty teeth

to stage a caravan

One in five American households

speaks a language other than English

but my people can’t get in a

Best-Pic nominee

without the label “foreign”

Be grateful that you are now 

presented with a choice between 

Black and    White

Prostrate melaniferous bodies 

weave into a shroud

covering the distance between 

George Floyd and today

Be grateful for crumbs that drop

from the high table

as we scramble

and gladiate in spectacle

for droppings

Half a million seemed like 

an impossible number

Last year   Valentine’s Day

was still lonely 

but in person

Be grateful

Why aren’t we grateful

Why are we so ungrateful

We are given a choice now

Isn’t it enough

A cloth cover is the real

hindrance to liberty

The 2020 “I voted” sticker

a high-priced memorabilia

for the lives risked

to those other than minorities

forced hyphenation 

worn as a crown

trudge past other saintly feasts

lay bare the sacrifice

Be grateful for the little things

The big ones are for the rarified

the falling birth rate

the fear of extinction

I guess they always knew

Dying stars burn the brightest

Rage

rage against the dying of the light

Imogen Arate is an award-winning Asian-American poet and writer and the Executive Producer and Host of the weekly poetry podcast Poets and Muses. She has written in four languages and published in two. Her work was most recently featured in the Global Poemic, Rigorous and The Hong Kong Review.

SELF-SATISFIED SONNET

by Joe Crocker

Graphic source: Geopolitical Intelligence Services.

The pandemic continues to widen income and wealth inequalities worldwide. The world’s richest five billionaires enjoyed a 59% increase in their combined wealth between March and September 202022 at a time of higher global levels of unemployment, poverty, and debt.16 Around 435 million women and girls will be living on less than $1.90 (£1.40; €1.60) a day in 2021, with 47 million in poverty as a result of covid-19. … These increases in private wealth have corresponded to decreases in social wage (the goods, services, and payments that the state provides to all residents as a basic right). Combined with the commodification of food, land, seeds, and essential services, austerity policies that have reduced social protection measures have had a devastating effect on vulnerable groups and, during the pandemic, increasingly on the middle class. Social protection measures introduced during the pandemic, such as tax relief, cash transfers, unemployment benefits, and food and nutrition assistance, have mostly been inadequate as they have excluded or been inaccessible to those who need them the most, such as informal workers, migrants, young people, and displaced and indigenous populations. An 82% increase in hunger levels is predicted as a result of the pandemic, and the number of people facing acute food insecurity is expected to double, especially in countries affected by conflict, climate change, and economic crisis. —The British Medical Journal, January 29, 2021

I wonder what the fuss is all about.

As far as I can see, not much has changed.

The paper comes each morning and, no doubt,

I’ll read it. But it’s groundhog day again.

 

My shares are on the up, my trousers tight

Mummy’s with us now. We sold her house.

It fetched enough to more than see her right.

The dog still gets his walk. And I get out.

 

The cleaner comes and does. We chat a while.

A sweetie. Molly? Mandy? I must ask.

Her eyes look oddly tired these days; her smile

a little less sincere behind her mask.

 

I spend the afternoons upon my arse.

I am retired and upper middle class.

Joe Crocker is retired and middle class and feeling guilty. Lockdown re-awakened his interest in poetry, and he has been published in Snakeskin. 

MANDATE

by Laura Rodley

My eyes see the road but my hands

steer the wheel, car ahead,

snow banks to my right,

more snow falling. It feels 

like a hundred years

now and still I have not

heard from you my daughter.

The daughter that was just a wish,

a dream, an incessant urge,

a tug to the infinite

and so I reached my hands

up and pulled you down

from clouds full of precipitation,

the month was November that

you were born, the isle of snow,

but conceived in February

on Valentine’s Day, my hands

full of the eyes of your father,

the sky filled with snowflakes.

Laura Rodley, Pushcart Prize winner, is a quintuple Pushcart Prize nominee and quintuple Best of Net nominee. Latest books: Turn Left at Normal by Big Table Publishing, Counter Point by Prolific Press, and just off the press, As You Write It Lucky Lucky 7, a collection of 11 writers' work.

MASKED AND DISTANCED

by Howie Good

Photo of Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp from the archives of the Memorial and Museum Sachsenhausen.

The avenue is near deserted, no parades,

few people, everyone a possible biohazard.

 

I sit at home in front of the computer

rather than be masked and distanced.

 

A 100-year-old man has been arrested

in Germany on 3,518 counts of being

an accessory to murder during the Holocaust.

 

When I lift my eyes from the screen,

it always seems to be night and raining.

Howie Good is the author of more than two dozen poetry collections, including most recently The Death Row Shuffle (Finishing Line Press), The Trouble with Being Born (Ethel Micro Press), and Gunmetal Sky (Thirty West Publishing).

THE FLORIDA CASE BEFORE THE ELECTORAL COMMISSION

by Lavinia Kumar

Cornelia Adele Fassett (1831-1898), Florida Case Before the Electoral Commission

                  

If Cornelia Fassett were here today,

she’d have painted a disputed election even larger.

 

The piece would have Facebook friends and tweets,

shown her Supreme Court chamber streamed live to millions.

 

Samuel Tilden won many more votes

but Rutherford Hayes fought the Electoral tally—

with twenty Electoral votes too short

he claimed voter intimidation and all sorts of fraud.

 

A Commission stood to create a miracle,

and debated nine days about voters in four states.

 

And, lo, they sought and found the needed,

which switched the Electoral College to Republican.

 

Ah, yes, it is said that history repeats,

but ghosts will tell that is not true of miracles.

Lavinia Kumar is currently interested in writing of unsung women of the past, Her poetry has appeared in US, Irish, & UK publications. Her books include Hear Ye, Hear Ye: Women, Women: Soldiers, Spies of Revolutionary and Civil Wars and No Longer Silent Women: the Silk and Iron of Women Scientists.

SKUNK HOUR

by Martin H. Levinson

 

His lawyers inept,

meandering, defending

the indefensible dimly

and dully, doing everything

they can but talk about the

constitutional question of

whether an out of office

president can be tried for

inciting insurrection, as the

Senators sitting in judgment

suffer their ambling, rambling

arguments made in response

to the House Managers logical,

precedent-based contentions

that a carny US Chief-of-State

can be punished for stirring up

mob violence and an invasion

of the Capitol that a video

montage has detailed in all

its nauseating horror.

Martin H. Levinson is a member of the Authors Guild, National Book Critics Circle, PEN America; the book review editor for ETC: A Review of General Semantics, and a contributing editor to The Satirist. He has published nine books and numerous articles and poems.

WHEN IT IS OVER

by Katherine Tian

A weekend afternoon, the park near my room,

the stone table where my friends and I used to sit is covered with a thick layer of dust.

Untrodden weeds cross the dirt path.

When it is over,

we will come together like a wind gust.

Our friendship will only bloom.

 

After a long day at work, a nurse mother goes home with a sigh of bliss.

She can only embrace her toddling daughter with her gaze and tears,

close at hand, but on opposite sides of the canyon.

When it is over,

my little dear,

Mom will hug you in her arms with a long kiss.

 

During a festival, I walk on the empty square,

music and fragrance that once wafted through the restaurant disappear like a cloud.

Now only cold wind blows through.

When it is over,

the long-lost crowd

will gather again to breathe the free, healthy air.

 

Golden wedding grandparents pass away in isolation, looking at each other like new lovers.

The memory and close goodbye can only dwell

in the relatives’ sorrow hearts.

When it is over,

the belated remembrances and farewells

will turn into rainy tears and falling flowers.

 

I miss the sound of my teacher's marker scratching on the white board,

the crowd in the hallway,

the morning flock of school buses.

When it is over,

to my dear teachers, I will say,

in the back of the classroom, I will never fall asleep or get bored.

 

The early spring flowers are about to sprout.

The birds in the trees are singing happily as they cheer.

At this darkest moment of the pandemic,

my dear friends,

can you hear

the footsteps of the warm sunshine behind the heavy cloud?

Katherine Tian is a senior at Ward Melville High School on Long Island, New York. She is a long-time dancer and a long-term volunteer at a local elder-care center.

LUXURIOUS FEAR

by Rebecca Leet

Source: We Do Geek

My head sinks into the pillow

and fear floats forward

like a ghoul set to stalk my dreams

 

so easy to keep ghosts

tautly moored when sun shines,

before night ingests hope.

 

I worry past the present pandemic

past the wild, sad souls ensnared

by visions of prurient perfidies

 

to a time closer than we dare declare

when swelling seas, infernos of forests,

acres of arid, fallow farmlands

 

push civilization to survival of the fittest

and my newborn grandchild, one day,

must claw over others or succumb.

 

Then morning comes and as I sip tea

news reports speak of children suffocating

from poison gas in Syria        girls kidnapped

 

by Boko Haram in Nigeria      a boy killed

in a random shooting five miles away.

And I realize my fear, today, is a luxury.

 

Rebecca Leet lives a stone's throw from Washington, DC.  Her collection Living with the Doors Wide Open was published in 2018.

JANUARY SIXTH

by Diane Vogel Ferri

The Jan. 6 rally of Trump supporters before the assault on the Capitol.Credit: Nina Berman/NOOR/Redux via The New York Times.

Let us not forget 

how we heard the crack of the breach

in every state, the unholy war

with bloated flags waving

dishonorably, whipping

in the felonious wind

Let us not forget

the terrorism of groupthink

the righteous pounding and shattering

the victims in their glory

holding blue-line banners

while violating blue lives

Let us not forget 

what we saw in real-time

the slurs we heard

the trashing of Jesus

of our tax dollars

our house a crime scene

Let us not forget

the present disremembering

of the big lie

how it is in the past now

consequences suffered only

by the dead

Diane Vogel Ferri is a teacher, poet, and writer living in Solon, Ohio. Her essays have been published in Scene Magazine, Cleveland Stories, Yellow Arrow Journal, and Good Works Review among others. Her poems can be found in numerous journals such as Plainsongs, Rubbertop Review, and Poet Lore. Her previous publications are Liquid Rubies (poetry), The Volume of Our Incongruity (poetry), The Desire Path (novel) and her newest novel No Life But This: A Novel of Emily Warren Roebling.

PILGRIMS PROGRESS

by Deborah Gorlin

Phineas Pratt's Grave in Charlestown MA

The inscriptions a kid could cartoon

on a gravestone, crude and simplistic,

the skull-soul effigy a kind of gothic lithic

Jack-o-lantern, wide hollows for eyes,

triangle for nose, slotted mouth,

snaggle-toothed, Medusa-like heads

winging hair. A second childhood

for the Puritan church as some feature

breasts, amen, as God-besotted poet

Edward Taylor wrote unblushingly,

his syntax, don’t ask, “to put these

nibbles, then my mouth into and suckle

me therewith humbly pray.” Gravestones

that put one in mind of crumbly English

biscuits, taken at teatime. Their headboards

face east towards the sunrise, when the dead

will wake one fine Sunday morning to the smell

of pancakes the Lord makes at a sleepover.

 

But the news today tells me they won’t

wait—rebranded their black white outfits,

buckled shoes, top hats, dressed this time

as the half-naked shaman in bear skins,

horn helmet, face paint, just like their old

enemies the Indians, why not, it’s on their land,

the Senate floor, to save us from those devils

in Pederast Forest. Fake 'em out. Boys. 

An impatient breed these new pilgrims, grown

young, who, in their first iteration, claimed

that specters in dreams and visions, those

with a third nipple, an ugly birthmark, a black

cat familiar, were evidence in a court of law

for burning witches and warlocks. Emboldened,

always exceptional, they invent new ways to rise

from their shallow graves of history, their scraggly

tombstones askew, who refuse, even their God, to die.

 

Deborah Gorlin is the author of two books of poems, Bodily Course (White Pine Poetry Press Prize) and Life of the Garment (Bauhan Publishing, winner of the 2014 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize). She has published in a wide range of journals including Poetry, Antioch Review, American Poetry Review, Seneca Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Harvard Review, Green Mountains Review, Bomb, Connecticut Review, Women’s Review of Books, New England Review, and Best Spiritual Writing 2000. Recent poems appear in Plume, On the Seawall, Chicago Quarterly, Trampoline, and the Ekphrastic Review. Emeritus associate faculty of the Writing Program at Hampshire College, she serves as a poetry editor at The Massachusetts Review. 

LOOKING FOR AMERICA

by George Salamon 

I looked for the American character,

and I saw the contours fading, the

words to sing of it sour or drab, I

seek refuge in old photo albums, 

capturing dignity and pride, coming

together in many kinds of work and

fulfillment, revealing what we had or

what we thought we had, now that

we're seeking the causes of our loss

as if our minds had shut down and our

hands and feet were bound, yet no

cause is so deep it cannot be found.

George Salamon live in the heartland of America, St. Louis, MO, and contributes to The Asses of Parnassus, One Sentence Poems, and The New Verse News.

TO KNOW A MONARCH

by Phyllis Klein

To know it only as a photograph, a memory.

Never to witness again a community of millions clustered 

on Eucalyptus branches, now empty.

These fragile slivers of stained glass

no longer clinging to winter respites.

What is a world that would allow

this extravagant pollinator to die off?

This migrational miracle. 

Rumi says, You were born 

with wings, why prefer to crawl through life?

I want a humanity that weeps 

copiously for this animal who starts off 

in a crawl, shows us how to fly. I want

processions, dirges everywhere,

want to howl over milkweed, bereft, without 

purpose. So much loss. I want to rend my garments.

Burn kaleidoscopes of butterflies into my skin.

What good would that do? Or I could slice

open the sky, so their ghosts torrent down. 

What do I know of softness—my origins 

in an ice-house, in a tradition of cruelty,

of abhorration, torn appendages. Where

are the wings for this? Where the flashes 

of orange slipped through our fingers?

Phyllis Klein’s work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is a finalist in the Sweet Poetry Contest, 2017, the Carolyn Forché Humanitarian Poetry Contest, 2019, and the Fischer Prize, 2019. She was nominated for a Pushcart prize in 2018 and again in 2020. She has a new book, The Full Moon Herald  from Grayson Books. Living in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 30 years, she sees writing as artistic dialogue between author and readers—an intimate relationship-building process that fosters healing on many levels. 

THE WHITE SUPREMACIST IN MY LIVING ROOM

by Lesléa Newman

White Supremacist’s Coat Rack by Enrico Bertuccioli.

staring out of my TV screen is white

of course. He has dark Charlie Manson hair,

a scraggly Unabomber beard,

and an old black dog with big black eyes

sprawled across his lap and gazing

up at him with absolute adoration.

The white supremacist on my TV screen

sits under the gun on his wall at ease

in his easy chair, leaning back

peering out at the camera intently.

He has a message for me but I do not care

to listen. Instead I prefer to watch

the watchful eyes of the old black dog

who is hanging on his master’s every word.

The white supremacist has unruly hair

that falls across his forehead into his eyes.

He rakes his long skinny fingers

through his long stringy hair

and then lets his hand float slowly

down toward the old black dog

who sits up straight, every atom

of his ancient body quivering

with joy as if he has been waiting all his life

for the white supremacist’s hand

to land on top of his head so gently

and with such genuine tenderness

that the old black dog’s mouth drops

open, showing his old black tongue

and jagged yellow teeth. The old black dog

is grinning. He is in on the joke.

His old black eyes look out at the camera

for just an instant as though he wants

to make sure I am seeing this great show

of affection before he turns back

to the white supremacist who warns

the world at large to beware of what lies

ahead. And now the white supremacist

removes his hand from the old black dog’s head

and rests it on the arm of his chair

and the old black dog rests his head happily

on the white supremacist’s knee

shutting his eyes and sighing a sigh

completely content and safe

in the knowledge that all is right

with the world. So much love.

So much hate. I turn my TV off.

Lesléa Newman has created 75 books for readers of all ages including the poetry collections, I Carry My Mother and I Wish My Father (a pair of memoirs-in-verse) and October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard  (novel-in-verse); and the children’s books, Sparkle Boy and Heather Has Two Mommies. She has received poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, two National Jewish Book Awards, the Massachusetts Book Award, the Sydney Taylor Award, and half a dozen Pushcart Prize nominations. From 2008 - 2010, she served as the poet laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts. Currently she teaches at Spalding University’s School of Creative and Professional Writing.