by Alan Walowitz
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| 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.
