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.

PRAYER AGAINST HEALING

by Liz Ahl

A satellite view of the Bootleg Fire burning in Oregon last week.Credit: NOAA, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, CIRA via The New York Times.

 

While flash floods hurl  

muddy torrents elsewhere, 

this NYC-sized fire lets loose  

its own brand of torrent,  

floods the drought-dried mountains 

with its hungry spill. 

 

I broadcast a cruel variant  

of prayer: that the destruction  

wreaked by the last big fires 

is still stark moonscape enough  

to refuse this newest ravaging;  

 

that the forest hasn’t recovered enough yet, 

that the masochistic cheatgrass  

hasn’t sprung up enough in between  

the skeletal remains of the trees,  

that the Winter Ridge—awful wish!—

might still be more barren wound than healed;  

that it can’t offer enough fuel yet  

to carry such a conflagration further 

or to deliver its blazing deluge all the way 

to the shrinking shores of the lakes 

or, somehow, beyond. 

 

That we won’t have to wait or pray 

for the too-late balm of October rains.  

 

That this ongoing ruin  

might have some use against itself. 

 

Liz Ahl is the author of Beating the Bounds (Hobblebush Books, 2017), as well as several chapbooks of poetry. Much of her recent published work was composed or revised during visits to the Playa Artist Residency Program, on the shore of Summer Lake, currently threatened by the Bootleg fire. She lives in Holderness, New Hampshire.

A LESSON IN PASSIVE VOICE

by Lauren Haynes

The Capitol was breached while I  

taught preteens the art of  

language, to bend and  

provoke, to  

evade and  

slice.  

The order of a sentence and its  

implications. The difference between  

“The letter was mailed to me by my grandparents.” and  

“My grandparents mailed the letter to me.”  

Inconsequential until remote learning tabs to  

the real world.  

Miss, they say,  

the offices of high-ranking members  

of Congress were entered.  

Miss, they say,  

the American flag was removed and replaced:  

MAKE AMERICA                              AGAIN.  

A bomb was planted.  

A coup was staged.  

Where is the subject?  

Miss, they say,  

Who is doing the action?  

Lauren Haynes holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Western Kentucky University and has been an English teacher for years.

NEW SHEPARD

by Monica Mills

the billionaire space race

is one without a finish line.

space tourists auction star

costs, haggle down heaven,

as latitude chokes the poor.

on supersonic joyrides white

collars pray greed into hemisphere.

on Earth oceans thrash aflame.

souls without homes look for sky.

find smog. find dollar signs

disguised as constellations.

the shepherd is a wolf. steals the herd.

no scapegoats are leashed

in fields of crumbling infrastructure.

rampant thistles, dandelions,

leeches of the grain root deep

into soil and call themselves farmers. 

Monica Mills is a Jamaican-American writer and poet. She is from Maplewood, New Jersey and has a bachelor’s degree in political science and English from Rutgers University. Monica’s work appears in journals such as The West Trade Review, The Anthologist, The Normal Review, and The Quiver Review among others. She enjoys rainy days and ginger tea. 

AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL 2.0

by Paul Smith

Cartoon by Nick Anderson.

Amid a widening partisan divide over coronavirus vaccination, most Republicans have either stoked or ignored the flood of misinformation reaching their constituents and instead focused their message about the vaccine on disparaging President Biden, characterizing his drive to inoculate Americans as politically motivated and heavy-handed. —The New York Times, July 20, 2021

O beautiful for spacious skies

America I speak no lies

Although I wish no harm to none

He who holds his arm back

dies

 

O beautiful for pilgrim feet

that tread upon the soil that’s blue

a thoroughfare

for arms that ache

while you over there

vacillate

prevaricate

until

real soon

it’s just too late

 

You who claim our fruited plain

is really red

and complain

and caterwaul

that this hoax is live

and science is dead

woe be to you

in twenty-two

 

You’re going to those halcyon skies

twice as fast as us guys

your electorate

is shrinking faster

than a speeding myth

count the votes

do the math

your crimson retreats

are no longer alabaster

 

In twenty twenty two or four

there will be more of us than you

your votes have shrunk

so go get drunk

and raise a toast

two years hence

or maybe four

our purple mountains

will all be blue

sad but true

sad for you

your selfish gain no longer stains

from coast to plain to turquoise coast

Paul Smith is a civil engineer who has worked in the construction racket for many years. He has traveled all over the place and met lots of people. Some have enriched his life. Others made him wish he or they were all dead. He likes writing poetry and fiction. He also likes Newcastle Brown Ale. If you see him, buy him one. His poetry and fiction have been published in Convergence, Packingtown Review, Literary Orphans, TheNewVerse.News, and other lit mags.

TOXIC REDUX

by Diane Elayne Dees

Video: Britney Spears’ full opening testimony during her conservatorship hearing. She speaks directly to Judge Brenda Penny and asks her to end the conservatorship.

“I want to feel heard, and I’m telling you this again so maybe you can understand the depth and the degree and the damage that they did to me... ” —Britney Spears

Hysteria was said to be cured 

by having sex. Or giving birth. 

Or having the Devil cast out

of a woman’s body.

Or being touched by magnetic hands.

Or hanged from a tree until dead.

“Don’t worry your pretty head, take this pill”—

and they danced as fast as they could,

then wound up shaking and quivering

in hospital rooms, sweating in bedrooms, 

and dazed in the dark rooms inside their heads.

“No one did that to you—the therapist put it

in your head.” 

“It’s your imagination.” 

“Why would you say those things about our family?”

“Stop acting like a child.”

Crazy women make good stories, 

good movies, good punchlines, 

good alibis.

You can drug them, wind them up, 

watch them dance, and steal their money.

All you need is a judge, a doctor, a lawyer,

some nurses, and the right genitalia.

The court declared you a protector—

of a mind, a uterus, a woman.

But crazy women everywhere know

that what is protected 

are your bank account,

your delusions, and your secret desire

to cast the Devil out of all of us.

Diane Elayne Dees is the author of the chapbook Coronary Truth (Kelsay Books) and two forthcoming chapbooks. Diane, who lives in Covington, Louisiana, also publishes Women Who Serve, a blog that delivers news and commentary on women's professional tennis throughout the world.

AS EMPATHY FAILED

by Imogen Arate

Cartoon by Nate Beeler (Cagle Cartoons) via Tulsa World.

Let them face the insecurity of not knowing 

if home will remain haven 

in the hours separating dawn and dusk

Let them taste the bitter metal of cruelty

that tosses life into uncertainty

while hiding behind secured gates

Let them be exposed without retreat

to ready canines famished for sinking

into the bleeding of abused flesh

As empathy could not sway

the concrete heart

let them be cast into the weight

of lead shoes drowning 

without fail in the muck 

below the azure of waterlines

Let the stirring chaos made

by unsympathetic hands

swallow their owners 

into the whirlwind they 

conjured with others in mind

Let this ouroboros birthed

in ill intent latch onto

its diseased umbilical tail 

and ensnare those who

envisioned its callous trap

in its tightening coil

Imogen Arate is an award-winning Asian-American poet and writer and the Executive Producer and Host of Poets and Muses, a weekly poetry podcast that won second place at National Federation of Press Women's 2020 Communications Contest. She proudly hails from an immigrant family whose previous undocumented status and associated economic burdens nearly robbed her the opportunity to pursue higher education.  She has written in four languages and published in two. Her works were most recently published on the Global Vaccine Poem Project and Documented Experiences and in The Opiate. You can find her @PoetsandMuses on Twitter and Instagram.

CLICKING

by Sari Grandstaff

Sari Grandstaff is a high school librarian. Her work has been published in many print and online journals including The New Verse News, Prune Juice, and Modern Haiku. Sari and her husband are weathering out their storms in the Catskill Mountains/Mid-Hudson Valley of New York State. 

A SATURDAY MATINEE OF SELECTED SHORT SUBJECTS

BILLIONAIRE SPACE(KU) DEUX

by Scott C. Kaestner

Cartoon by Marian Kamensky Tweeted by Advaid അദ്വൈത് @Advaidism, July 14, 2021. 

(1)

Shoot them into space

And redistribute their wealth

To heal our planet

(2)

Orbit the greedy

To build a brighter future 

For all of us here

Scott C. Kaestner is a Los Angeles poet, writer, dad, husband, and forgetful mind magician who can’t find the rabbit or his hat. Google ‘scott kaestner poetry’ to peruse his musings and doings.

In a Nutshell

by Melissa Balmain

Detail of a cartoon tweeted by Jim Carrey @JimCarrey, November 10, 2018.

“Big Jake, the World’s Tallest Horse, Dies in Wisconsin” 

—USA Today, July 6, 2021.

“Untethered to reality, T***p lies over and over about the 2020 election at CPAC” 

—CNN, July 12, 2021.

The biggest horse is sadly dead and gone.

And yet, the biggest horse’s ass lives on.

Melissa Balmain edits Light, America's longest-running journal of comic poetry. Her newest book of verse is The Witch Demands a Retraction: Fairy Tale Reboots for Adults (Humorist Books).

Ohtani of Oz

by Earl J. Wilcox

 

No hidden  smoke screens

No sticky stuff  in his glove

He pitches. Then hits. Bam!

 

 

Earl Wilcox—amazed at Ohtani’s wizardry—lives in South Carolina.

MORTALITY EVENT

by Erin Murphy

Scientists Still Searching for the Pathogen Behind the East's Songbird Epidemic: In a new report, experts ruled out a range of causes, but they still recommend taking down feeders until the source of the disease is identified. —Audubon, July 8, 2021. Photo: A young Blue Jay admitted to the Blue Ridge Wildlife Center in Virginia with an unknown illness. Credit: Blue Ridge Wildlife Center via Audubon.

Songbirds stumble,  

crusty eyes gunked shut  

with conjunctivitis.  

 

Out of an abundance  

of caution, we remove  

feeders where they cluster  

 

like us to cluck about  

the latest scuttlebutt.  

Hands gloved, we dump  

 

the double-bagged dead,  

muttering that it’s redundant.  

We who have too much  

 

do not fund hungry children  

but grumble when unable  

to fuss over cardinals  

 

in lush gardens. We suffer  

from an abundance  

of abundance. 

Erin Murphy’s latest book, Human Resources, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Diode, The American Journal of Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her awards include the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, The Normal School Poetry Prize, and a Best of the Net award. She is Poetry Editor of The Summerset Review and Professor of English at Penn State Altoona.

REFLECTION

by Greer Gurland

Mike Hoffman, 27, was ejected from a Jeep and killed by a drunk driver in New Hampshire Tuesday afternoon, authorities said. Photo Credit: Facebook/Mike Hoffman —Middlesex Daily Voice, July 7, 2021.

When I woke today, someone had died.

A driver drunk. 

The car rolled over and the others are alive, 

but not the son of the gym teacher.

Mr, Hoffman.

Mr. Hoffman does not write poetry or songs

far as I know.

He’s not Shakespeare but who's to say 

who loved more? 

What will he do now? What will he do?

I know. Be still 

kinder to the children. 

He will eek it out, give more, and mark 

the joy in open eyes. The rain will cover 

the windows covered with metal bars

but not enough. 

So funny, but before that, during the night, 

I spoke of my parents 

in the past tense

as if to convince myself I will survive.

Author's Note: Mr. Hoffman is a teacher at my son’s new school which serves kids with special needs. Although I have yet to meet Mr. Hoffman, I can tell from the staff’s grief that Mr. Hoffman is beloved.

Greer Gurland is a graduate of Harvard College (‘91) where she was Managing Editor of The Harvard Advocate and lucky enough to study with Seamus Heaney. She recently returned to writing and earned her MFA. She has two chapbooks: It Just So Happens …Poems to Read Aloud (Finishing Line Press 2018) and In the crowded future (Finishing Line Press 2021). Most recently, Greer was a finalist for the Moon City Book Prize.

IN FIVE STEPS: THE ROUTE TO ESCAPE MARTYRDOM

by A. C.

1.     Do Not Mourn. Especially faces who have long endured

old style glass frames in spectacles. Glasses foraying into

the future, your uv tinted ones can never hope to testify

about. Vision for the sake of the land forsaken kind.

‘Deprived of rights over natural resources’ kind.

 

2.     Do Not Hope. For the Mahars (you are allowed to read

the fine print spelled D-A-L-I-T) to be commemorated

in reverence of plaques. For the girl whose soul may still

hope to rise from the well to testify in court. For people

giving their lives to see they live or die a notch better.

For the law to be your friend. Or for anything that may

well feed your spine. With the contraband fruit of justice.

3.     Do Not Plead Not Guilty. You are, for the matter. Guilty

of unlawful actions unheard and unseen of. Till one evening

men and women in uniform storm your doors, seizing you

by the collar. Or wait till you survive the guilt

once your child points at the face of an old grandfather

permeating all over the news.

Let them ask you then, “aren’t we taught to respect our

Elders”?

 

4.     Do Not Feel Shame. For watching over typed phrases, statements

and words supposed to inform you. Of an octogenarian’s contraction

of something the world understands as pandemic. But within custody

of course, disease runs trivial. What’s Parkinson's anyway?

Just another condition, neurodivergent, doesn’t kill eh!

So, up to you to believe or refuse if the octogenarian

had his share of sippers, straw, medicine and treatment

in custody! Lucky if you believe, sad if you do not!

 

5.     Do Not Think. Let your cognitive power focus upon

your yoga sessions, parallel world of a post pandemic vision.

Trips to catch up, the how to of a self-reliant nation. Who cares?

of UNDP rants on sustainable development, inclusivity of the

indigenous population? There are governments for that, honest

and fair. Meanwhile sleep peacefully, Human Rights often fear

the ivory towers.

Author's Note: Father Stanislaus Lourduswamy breathed his last in judicial/government custody after spending his entire life working for the uplifting of the Adivaasi community in India (especially in Jharkhand). He prepared a report titled ‘Deprived of Rights Over Natural Resources’ highlighting the plight of the Adivaasi landless population. He had been implicated in a case under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) still pending in court and kept in jail despite his age and other pre-existing health conditions. His death in custody speaks volume of the present situation of democratic dissent/treatment in the country.

A. C. writes from India. Her work has appeared in The Alipore Post, Life and Legends Journal, and elsewhere. She has been a contributor in an anthology titled Narratives On Women’s Issues In India: Vol 1 Domestic Violence published by the IHRAF, New York and a global feminist anthology, Looking Glass Anthology Vol. 2. 

PYROCENE THIS TIME

by Corey Weinstein

 

Nowhere winds bluster cloudless skies

blistering skins of rattle-windowed homes,

The parched air bites through wilted gardens,

Dry lightning judges the boiling world,

Heaven’s fiery tongues crackle the air

that booms the world without drenching grace,

Bestowing 8,000 square mile conflagrations,

Gaia’s retribution for dragging incendiaries

up from her breast with mine and pump,

Ripping off mountain tops, greasing her fissures,

Terra not Firma shakes our foundations.

 

Who is this people, these fire starters

that bespoil their nest and neighbor’s land?

In bands they were heroes of ice time survival

in pleasant harmony with their birthing world,

Now their fires are hidden in machines,

Personal aluminum hundred horse teams.

              Firepower unbound

                              Industrial pyro-pathologies

 Burning day and night

                      Blind to deluge and drought

                 Billions          Coal

     Tons             Gallons               Gas

           Billions     Daily     Billions!    

                Unimaginable bounty

                  Essential inferno.

 

A world melting into a grandchild’s future.

Corey Weinstein is a retired physician whose poetry has been published in Vistas and Byways, The New Verse News, Forum, and Jewish Currents. He currently attends writing classes at Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in San Francisco and hosts their Poetry Circle. Weinstein has also been published in a number of medical/academic publications. He is an advocate for prisoner rights as the founder of California Prison Focus, and he led the American Public Health Association’s Prison Committee for many years. In his free time, he plays the clarinet in a local jazz band.

I SHOULD BE ABLE TO WRITE A PROTEST POEM

by Margaret Rozga

Cartoon by Steve Sack, Star Tribune, July 7, 2021

I should be able to write a poem

about Afghani interpreters being given asylum

or rather not being given asylum, being dangled

the delicate hope of asylum for whatever that is worth.

 

Asylum acquired narrow connotations

as in insane asylum, not a refuge

but a silencing, an abandoning.

 

I should be able to write

with the insistent beat of a heart on fire,

the passion of Whitman’s barbaric yelp,

the precision of an accountant

totaling the debt to be repaid.

 

Airlift Afghani allies to the Field Station

where I write of black-eyed susans

counting their thirteen brilliant petals

flower after flower, utterly dependable.

 

We should. I should. What is power for?

What are words for?

 

If they do not set deeds in motion,

if they do not celebrate good,

if they do not open up space,

if they allow moral failure

if they do not uncover names

of the unnamed who throw up

obstacles to justice,

        then

be forever silent.

 

As 2019-2020 Wisconsin Poet Laureate, Margaret Rozga co-edited the anthology Through This Door: Wisconsin in Poems (Art Night Books, 2020) and the chapbook anthology On the Front Lines / Behind the Lines (pitymilkpress, 2021). Her fifth book of poems is Holding My Selves Together: New and Selected Poems (Cornerstone Press, 2021).

MELT

by Chad Parenteau

“Heat Check” by Headlines at The Nib, July 8, 2021.

If the earth

is warming

why is there

still ice?

It’s summer.

Leave affairs

to boil on

picnic table.

Why else our

country a pot

if we’re not

to pour in?

Stand ground,

plant feet

in malleable

tar roads.

Cook skin

to bronze,

be own

memorial.

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 latest collection The Collapsed Bookshelf was nominated for a Massachusetts Book Award.

SELECT COMMITTEE

by Claude Clayton Smith

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announces her appointments to a new select committee to investigate the violent Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol, on Capitol Hill in Washington, July 1, 2021. From left are Rep. Elaine Luria, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Rep. Stephanie Murphy, Rep. Pete Aguilar, Rep. Adam Schiff, Rep. Zoe Lofgren and Rep. Bennie Thompson. Rep. Liz Cheney also accepted Pelosi's invitation to join the committee. Credit: J. Scott Applewhite/AP via abc news.

A singularity occurs but once in time

and space: the Big Bang, for instance;

 

or at a point of infinite mass density

where gravity distorts such time and space

into the final state of matter as it’s

black hole bound;

.

or when the derivative of a given function

of a complex variable does not exist, but

every neighborhood of which contains points

for which the variable does exist.

 

And now comes a new singularity:

a select committee to investigate

whether a house divided against itself

can stand, or if the point at which all

concepts that give life meaning

become irrelevant.

 

Professor Emeritus of English at Ohio Northern University, Claude Clayton Smith is the author of eight books and co-editor/translator of four others. His own books have been translated into five languages, including Russian and Chinese.

SPACE-TIME DESIRE

by Art Goodtimes

Tweeted by @SciencepornPics

More than the spark

of the 4th’s faux bombardments

 

it’s the dark

with its slow burn

of thousands of nuclear fires

 

that makes me appreciate

the exploding population of stars

that we imitate

 

That all nature mimics

 

This space-time desire

to expand beyond all limits

 

That colors our lives

vermillion and gold

and speeds our demise

as a billionaire species

 

Beautiful

Deadly

Perplexing

 

Art Goodtimes was an Earth First! poetry editor before getting elected to five terms as a Green county commissioner in Southwestern Colorado, where U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Rifle) now represents the Third Congressional district in Congress. Art is co-director of Talking Gourds, a local and regional poetry program under the non-profit aegis of the Telluride Institute.

A VETERAN POKÉMON GO TRAINER LEAVING BAGRAM, AFGHANISTAN, WRITES HAIKU

by Randy Brown

Digital rodents and abandoned Pokemon presided over the streets of Bagram Airfield on the day news broke that U.S. troops had left the base. All U.S. forces have left Bagram, which for much of the past 20 years was the largest military base in Afghanistan, U.S. defense officials announced Friday. But the animated critters and some of what’s left on base are visible in digitally animated form through the game app Pokemon Go. The game allows players to walk to real-life locations and catch or battle digital monsters, who can be found using the app’s barebones version of Google Maps. Some of the Pokemon left by U.S. soldiers remain at their posts.  —Stars and Stripes, July 2, 2021

1.

at the Pink Palace

our old brigade headquarters

Jigglypuff awaits

 

2.

in a clamshell gym

sweating in treadmill safety

I was Wartortle

 

3.

old Russian minefield

where I caught my Charizard

best day of my war

 

4.

after deployment

I can speak more Pikachu

than I can Pashtu

 

5.

farewell, Poké-stan

we leave you a ghost army

stardust and candies

Randy Brown embedded with his former Iowa Army National Guard unit as a civilian journalist in Afghanistan, May-June 2011. A 20-year veteran with one overseas deployment, he subsequently authored the 2015 poetry collection Welcome to FOB Haiku: War Poems from Inside the Wire. He also co-edited the 2019 anthology Why We Write: Craft Essays on Writing War. He is a three-time poetry finalist in the Col. Darron L. Wright Memorial Writing Awards administered by the literary journal Line of Advance. His poetry and non-fiction have appeared widely in print and on-line, including most recently in the graphic anthology True War Stories published by Z2 Comics. As “Charlie Sherpa,” he blogs about modern war poetry at www.fobhaiku.com, and about military-themed writing at www.aimingcircle.org. 

LEFT BEHIND IN AFGHANISTAN

by Tricia Knoll

“Taliban Try to Polish Their Image as They Push for Victory: The insurgents are trying to rebrand themselves as effective governors as they capture new territory. But there is more evidence that they are unreformed.” —The New York Times, July 6, 2021. Photo: Members of the Taliban in Laghman Province in eastern Afghanistan last March. Credit: Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times.

American stuff. Artificial Christmas trees. Humvees. 

Boots that mark the Afghan soil with the treads

of Americans. Little shops sell discards

like aluminum mugs. No longer sell the body armor. 

They do sell Jif peanut butter, alarm clocks, 

backpacks festooned with swooshes, 

instant coffee, exercise stretch ropes, 

hand sanitizer and tea bags. 

 

Bagram first the pulverized Soviet airfield, 

turned burgeoning American stronghold

with Pizza Huts and Subways, field hospital

and a prison gifted to the Afghan defense ministry.  

 

Then the women left behind. What will they be asked

to wear, to think, to learn? What will divide urban

women from rural? Will medical care advance?

What happens to the voices of the poets, activists,

radio DJs, victims of domestic violence? What music

will they hear? What input to the terms of peace? 

Will electricity return as swiftly as sharia justice? 

When women hold up half the sky,

never leave behind the hope of soaring.

Tricia Knoll is a feminist poet who never takes for granted the freedoms she has enjoyed while advocating for the role of women in our world. Her poetry appears widely in journals and anthologies. 

FOSSIL FUGUE

by Dustin Michael

Researchers in Australia have confirmed the discovery of Australia's largest dinosaur species ever found. Australotitan cooperensis was about 80 to 100 feet long and 16 to 21 feet tall at its hip. It weighed somewhere between 25 and 81 tons. For comparison, the Tyrannosaurus rex was about 40 feet long and 12 feet tall. Photo: Scott Hocknull and Eromanga Natural History Museum Director Robyn Mackenzie hold a model of what the humerus of the dinosaur would have looked like next to the fossilized remains of the humerus. Credit: Eromanga Natural History Museum via NPR,June 8, 2021.

What is the price for a puppet show with 

fewer puppets but more stories? Always 

the same story endlessly staged, 

every age’s marionettes and the same 

tired tale, a shifting cast of shadows 

behind the age-old screen.

Study any desert, and behold 

that same sun blistering their backs,

baking their bodies and bones, the breadcrumbs 

of immigrants, their grim trail markers and that same

the docile plodding rhythm, a drumbeat of footsteps 

from the fossil record ringing through time. 

Here is another variation. 

They walked, shielding their young 

with their own bodies, their necks 

like cracked leather, craned high

toward new skies, the breath

of hunger, thirst, and danger fogging 

each footfall, their scaled feet disturbing 

the dust, scattering already ancient rocks, stale

wind whistling faint melody in the world’s eternal 

fugue.

The news reports these dinosaur bones came 

from creatures as big as basketball courts

whose Patagonian ancestors crossed connected 

continents and arrived in Australia. 

No boats to be turned back, no papers to be denied, 

no armed agents or bureaucratic barriers to halt them—

only land in stretches longer 

than even their tales and necks,

and vengeful heat, and hungry earth

whispering Not to worry, not to worry, 

even if they never find all of your bones

the story of your journey 

will always be retold. 

Faith-based groups are working to protect migrants and honor those who have died while attempting to cross the southern border from Mexico into the United States. Humane Borders is an organization that sets up water stations in the Arizona desert on routes used by migrants to cross the border. The group also works with Pima County chief medical examiner Dr. Gre Hess to document the discovery of bodies of those who died on the journey. According to the Associated Press, Hess's office received the remains of 79 border-crossers this year as of late May. In 2020, Humane Borders documented 227 deaths, the highest in a decade after a record hot and dry summer in Arizona. Activists fear this year will be even worse. —Newsweek, July 5, 2021. Photo: Unidentified bones found in the desert and suspected to be that of a migrant are assembled together for examination at the Pima County Medical Examiner's forensic labs in Tucson, Ariz. Credit: Ross D. Franklin/Associated Press via The Journal, July 5, 2021.

Dustin Michael lives in Georgia and teaches college writing and literature. His work has appeared in numerous literary journals and his favorite dinosaur is stegosaurus, not that anyone asked.

THE FIFTH OF JULY

by Michael L. Ruffin

The Fifth of July, 1776.

Mr. Jefferson, contemplating.

Thinking about what they have started.

Pondering the struggle that lies ahead.

Wondering how long it will take to secure

the independence they have declared.

The Fifth of July, 2021.

I, contemplating.

Thinking about how far we've come.

Pondering the struggle that still lies ahead.

Wondering how long it will take to secure

real liberty and true freedom for all of us--

for every last one of us.

And it occurs to me:

it is always the Fifth of July

in the United States of America--

and it always will be.

Michael L. Ruffin is a writer, editor, preacher, and teacher living and working in Georgia. He posts poems on Instagram (@michaell.ruffin) and prose opinions at On the Jericho Road. He is author of Fifty-Seven: A Memoir of Death and Life and Praying with Matthew. His poetry has appeared at The New Verse News, Rat's Ass Review, 3 Moon Magazine, and U-Rights Magazine.