AUTO PARTS

by Jeremy Nathan Marks 

Trump indicated consumers could avoid tariffs by buying vehicles built entirely in the U.S., but industry experts say there’s not a single one with all-domestic parts and assembly. —NBC News, April 1, 2025

It’s a game called telephone.

 

I say fuel pump

and you say pump assembly

to the next guy who utters

maquiladora 

before his partner says

Juarez City

 

Juarez City sends me

an assembly pump and I say

Que? No entiendo.  

then I call you about a fuel

filter and you get on the horn

to your buddy in Alabama

who hears Pressure Regulator

calling up Jane in Windsor,

Ontario who phones Carlota in Sonora

 

Hola? Hola. ¿Cómo está usted?

Carlota replies

regulador de presión

Jane murmurs 

momento

and picks up from Gilles

in Trois-Rivières 

 

Ouais. Unité d’envoi de carburant?

Ouais, says Gilles.

D’accord, Gilles Jane replies

before flipping a linguistic switch

in her mind, telling

Carlota

 

Gracias, mi amiga

so that by the time she gets home

and her junior kindergartener

asks how your day was mom

she thinks he says carburetor

which is what I said to my partner

when she asked me what’s for dinner.  

Jeremy Nathan Marks lives in the auto-producing region of Canada. His latest book is Captain's Kismet (Alien Buddha Press, 2025).

CALLING OUT THE NUMBERS

by Sharon Olson

DOGE Has Decimated the Institute of Museum and Library Services —artnet, March 31, 2025

In some retellings the Library of Alexandria
was burned by Julius Caesar, accidentally,
a casualty of war.

No accident the flashlights of the Doge,
peering with damning light, threatening
the rolled-up scrolls sitting pretty
next to 21st-century flash drives.

I can think of Dewey numbers 
the Great Leader would not like: 
sexual relations both gay and straight, 
301.424, public measures to prevent 
disease, 614.5, the library as refuge 
for the homeless, 362.5, Palestine 
and Israel shelved together, 956.94, 
even something so benign
as 351.1, federal jobs.

Not a bad idea to digitize, lest the temperature
rise to Fahrenheit 451, and only an AI librarian
available to operate the hose.


Sharon Olson is a retired California librarian who now lives in Annapolis, Maryland. Her book The Long Night of Flying was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2006. Her second book Will There Be Music? was published by Cherry Grove Collections in 2019.

LET US RAISE OUR VOICES

by Cecil Morris

The Trump administration laid off thousands of federal health workers, dismissing senior leaders and top scientists in a purge that outside experts and former officials said would cause an immeasurable loss of expertise. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has suggested the layoffs could tame his department’s $1.8 trillion budget, but less than 1 percent of its spending goes to staff. —The New York Times, April 2, 2025

Let us raise our voices to those
who think no one deserves
anything they can’t afford,
not water, not air, not dirt. 

Let us raise our voices to those 
who think the only good trapeze act
is one performed with no net,
one with danger, real risk
of possible disaster
to focus the performance.

Let us raise our voices to those
who think we weaken ourselves,
our community, our country
by subsidizing the refugee,
the halt, the blind, the ill, the poor
and their children, and farmers. 

Let us raise our voices to those
who think the egregiously wealthy
need shelters and protections, need
tax breaks and subsidies, too,
who think their wealth will trickle down,
a golden shower on the poor.

Let us raise our voices to those
who think that only the fittest
should survive, who really think
that God gives to each what they
have earned, who think they know
the will of God and understand
the covenant of just desserts.

Let us raise our voices.

Cecil Morris, a retired high school English teacher and Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, has poems appearing in The Ekphrastic Review, Hole in the Head Review, The New Verse News, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection At Work in the Garden of Possibilities (Main Street Rag) will come out in 2025.  He and his wife, mother of their children, divide their year between the cool coast of Oregon and the relatively hot Central Valley of California.

CARP

by Alan Walowitz

Source: Great Lakes Fishery Commission

llinois delays project to keep invasive carp out of Great Lakes, cites uncertainty over federal funding.—National Public Radio, February 12, 2025

In response to an executive order from the White House targeting Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, the firm’s chair, Brad Karp, cut a deal with Trump to provide $40 million in free legal support and conduct an audit of the firm’s DEI employment and hiring protocols. —Fast Company, March 30, 2025
 

Tech boggles me more and more as I age.
My birthday and here comes a new computer, 
a gift to myself, since my family said,
too pedestrian a want for a man of my years.
But just as Microsoft hoped, 
I’ve rolled over for the Windows 11 scam—
the same way Brad Karp of Paul, Weiss,
the legal behemoth, rolled over 
for the Orange Menace, 
who took up residence in the head lawyer’s head. 
 
My mother was a proud Karp and I’m proud to be,
though not related to any kind of fortune 
other than a few rolls of wallpaper,
and, like Brad, a tendency to find it tough to sleep-- 
though I don’t call them billing hours. 
On behalf of such fish everywhere, 
I’m distressed to learn 
the damage the carp can do to the Great Lakes, 
or, now I know, the world at large.
 
The moral of the story: don’t read this poem,
or hire a Karp to fight a parking ticket.  
You don’t want to give money or power to a fish 
eating the waters of Illinois alive. 

Alan Walowitz is a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry.  His chapbook Exactly Like Love comes from Osedax Press. The full-length The Story of the Milkman and Other Poems is available from Truth Serum Press. Most recently, from Arroyo Seco Press, is the chapbook In the Muddle of the Night written with poet Betsy Mars. Now available for free download is the collection The Poems of the Air from Red Wolf Editions.

COLLEGE WALK

by Philip Kitcher

Students and neighbors are suing the school [Columbia], magnifying the broader complaint that institutions stifle free expression when they restrict access to public spaces following protests. —The New York Times, March 27, 2025
 
 
The locals used to wander through.
No obstacles. They’d pass
the open gates. They’d spend an hour or two
kicking a ball, or lying on the grass.
 
No student ID was required,
no need to fear
they were unwelcome. Young ones were inspired
to think they’d study here.
 
Now it’s a fortress. Honeyed words can’t stem
the nagging fear
that higher education’s not for them:
they are intruders here.
 
Officials at the shuttered gates divide
the privileged from neighbors. Must they feel
that they are destined to remain outside?
Can wounds inflicted daily ever heal?

Philip Kitcher has written too many books about philosophy, a subject which he taught at Columbia for many years. His new book The Rich and the Poor (Polity Press) is all about the costs of abandoning morality in politics and public life. His poems have appeared online in Light, Lighten Up Online, Politics/Letters, Snakeskin, and The Dirigible Balloon; and in print in the Hudson Review.