THE NEW DHARMA BUMS

by Bradley McIlwain 

When I could not sing

Drunk on disillusionment
And pain 

Shiva drank the poison

From my throat 
To free my spirit 

From city lights

That burned too bright 
My past cremated in ashes and bottle caps

Too much bar puja

Midweek between pints 
And poetry 

Searching for Kerouac’s

Drunken Dharma Bums
Looking for enlightenment 

In the Desolation Peaks

And the road is a ghost 
Holding out my thumb 

Like old Dean Moriarty 

The highway line a rehab
Of breakthroughs and breakdowns.

Enlightenment 

A bridge that burns 
At both ends 

And the only way out

Is in;
The only way to the universe… within

Hopping freight trains 

In early morning fog
The lakes and forests 

Of America 

On fire with desire 
Boxcar wine and scrawl 

Of poet pirates 

Prophesying on 
The great railway lines 

Swallowing the landscape 

Like a serpent 
Of what might have been…

Vasuki

Coiled in the winds 
Of immortality 

Carries me to the desert 

Of mirage and reality 
Of starlight and self doubt 

A new Mahabharata

Through doorways 
Of non Euclidean dreams

Where the chaos 

Of freedom is born 
In the dust of factory floors;

Discarded verses 

Rediscovered in dust 
Swept up and drank 

From voices with dry tongues 

As a tonic for the cause.
The well spring of hope 

Lies just beyond the sun,

My rucksack as heavy 
As the heart of the mountain’s back.

Bradley McIlwain works as a Teacher-Librarian, where he strives to provide meaningful and inclusive spaces for knowledge exchange and advocacy. He believes that poems and poets can be agents for social change. Bradley’s latest book Dear Emily was published by Roasted Poet Press last year.

LAST WORDS

by Shalmi Barman

He didn’t die cursing the tanks
or the turrets or swarming drones 
or the hillsides laid for ambush
or the cratered country road
harboring executioners.
 
I hear him through the static,
the shatter of windshield and bone,
chanting between gunshots
a prayer for the fleeing soul
            o god accept my repentance
            o mother forgive my choice
pleading against the darkness
with blood and breath and voice.
 
Let him be saved, if there’s saving,
while we damned in his stead
scream unresting curses 
to make the heavens deaf.

Shalmi Barman, originally from Calcutta, India, is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Virginia where she is writing a dissertation on class and labor in Victorian fiction. Her poetry has been featured in Gyroscope Review, Rat's Ass Review, Snakeskin, The Crank, and elsewhere.

STANDING UP, POURING OUT

by L. Lois

Vancouverites rallied at the U.S. Consulate [last month] to protest the imposition of tariffs on Canadian imports. —City News, March 4, 2025

runways paved through city
blocks for us to walk
places to put our protest
cars stopped
by the coupling of bodies
massing to chant
the poison must be choked
 
texting the message
email chains binding keyboard wrists
worn raw by tyranny
feet shuffling out the door
marching down
cement plazas giving way
to anger echoing between the buildings
 
hubris weights its own downfall
compassion and arrogance
feel the same in a cold heart
the court jester turns to inform
sacred trust scattered across ballots
gathered by the greedy
presumes civility requires passivity
 
voices lift
to swing their signs
feet pound
freedom's patience
taxed and thin
hydrants knock open
spewing cleansing

Author’s note: As a Canadian, I will be joining the April 5th mass movement by gathering with other concerned global citizens outside the US Consulate in Vancouver, British Columbia.

L. Lois lives in an urban hermitage where trauma-informed themes flow during walks by the ocean. She is pivoting through her grandmother-era, figuring out why her bevy of adult children don’t have babies. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Breakfast, Open JA&L, Fictional Cafe, The Mid-Atlantic Review, Washington Square Review, Sparks of Calliope, and other literary publications.

VENN DIAGRAM

by Karen Warinsky

Intersected by a hundred forces

we stand, affected energy 

over laps of spirit, sport, seduction,

a hundred tugs

and we try to

integrate

pull what’s useful to us,

cling to what might matter

as matter pummels 

our very bones

and signs tell us:

 

You Are Here.

 

You Are Here

where spirit meets 

grace meets love,

where democracy

collides with fascism

where the Earth sits

in its designated spot

amid endless planets and moons

stardust and expanding space,

where interesting cultures

mingle with manufactured conflicts,

where real conflicts clash

with solutions and greed

where apathy aligns with sorrow

where rage rests against response,

reaction, resolution.

 

You Are Here.

What will you decide to do?

Karen Warinsky has published poetry in numerous anthologies, journals and online sites since 2011. She is the author of three collections: Gold in Autumn (2020), Sunrise Ruby (2022), and Dining with War (2023). She is a 2023 Best of the Net nominee and a former finalist of the Montreal International Poetry Contest. Warinsky coordinates Poets at Large, a group that performs spoken word in MA and CT. Her new book Beauty and Ashes will be released later this year from Kelsay Books.

DO NOT

by Devon Balwit

after Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

Cartoon by Custodio.

Do not
 
check the box saying I agree when you haven’t
read the terms, nor put an I believe sign in the front
yard while the yardless are being hauled out the back,
nor assume threat ugly rather than urbane and slick,
nor think one must sloganize to fight (for a lone wag
can be sufficiently ironical to shake the dog),
wor forget the power of art to move unfettered
by a common style, nor worry you must do it better
even to begin, nor avert from sure embarrassment—
for nothing embarrasses more than the human predicament—
our minds in compostable bodies, seeking the light
in the brief blip between birth and night.
Do not obey evil in advance, die
before you’re dead, or—worst of all—refuse to try.

 

Devon Balwit walks in all weather and edits for Asimov Press, Asterisk Magazine, and Works in Progress.

HE COULDN’T CARE LESS

No eggs I can afford!

     Couldn’t care less

No job with government

    Couldn’t care less

Can’t pay for room and board

    Couldn’t care less

Can’t afford a car.

    Couldn’t care less

Can’t keep health insurance

    Couldn’t care less

My children have measles

    Couldn’t care less

But cod liver oil’s sold out!

    Couldn’t care less

Campaigning again

    Dems should care more

Because He Couldn’t care less

By Joe Blow who couldn’t care more

Ralph La Rosa invented this Joe Blow.

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.