THE WEEKLY NUISANCE

by Edmund Conti

"Trump Time" by John Mavroudis, The New Yorker

You want to be a cover boy
And that is good and well.
But let me tell you, Lover Boy,
Time will tell.


Edmund Conti has never been on the cover of any magazine, real or fake. Sad.

NAMING OF PARTS

by Tricia Knoll

Image source: White Mountain Puzzles

After Henry Reed

Spring eased the almond blossoms open
and promises of cherries while we named parts
left over from winter. Collusion. Taking
away, reducing, throwing in the trash
legal widgets that keep the water pure,
air open to the cherry’s pollen flight.

We named parts with words round
to our tongues, like emoluments, to see
how that piece fit in the grooves
of palaces and greens like golf courses.
Lies are new lower swing swivels
alternatives, the stock aiming.
We call the liar  a number, not a name.

We watched tired armies of people
whose papers dictate that they bolt
backwards, locked. Riled bees assault
the fumbling flowers and some too
called that easing the spring.

Assembled from parts, the barrel
is loaded and pointed at every one
of us. The sick. Disabled. Those
who stumbled. Women mourning
in too many dry cities to count.
Children born to know only this.

Whatever bitter cold silence ensues,
whatever violence, these parts came
forged as cocking-pieces, and the many
words to name them buzzed over us
diseasing the spring.

Tricia Knoll is an Oregon poet who in the last week has read Henry Reed's famous 1942 poem "The Naming of Parts" about fifteen times, sharing the dismay of progressives at how rapidly important protections of people and the environment can be dismantled. Her new book, Broadfork Farm, is a series of love poems to a small organic farm in Trout Lake, Washington.

THE DEVIL OF A DILEMMA

by Regina Vitolo

Image by Matt Chase, The New York Times, February 17, 2016.

the mistress of the universe has deigned to immerse us
in the devil of a dilemma
as complex as puppet strings intertwined dancing
on a papier-mâché platform
the planets collide, missiles leave silos, gravity reverses,
earth trembles
nonsense makes the best sense, nonetheless, so say
the pundits of the day
the wrecking ball swings, misses the gringo living yuge
in the capitol—
claims Andrew Jackson could have resolved the Civil War
but for a few facts
be damned, like the Constitution (no longer relevant) and
the NINTH CIRCUIT
to be mission accomplished with a tweet or two or more.


Words fascinate Regina Vitolo and ignorance in a leader shivers her liver. She has been published, but is willing to absorb more.

WHAT T***P KNOWS

by Michael Collins

It’s not a question
of knowing it
in your bones:
It’s a question
of knowing it
in their bones—
Rule the mind and all
the rest follows:
Bend ignorance like a bow.
Grow and grow, tower:
Machiavelli said it centuries ago:
Be the giant of hypocrites,
the titan liars; be the giant
of seeming: cut the tree
of knowledge down
and build a stage; bring
your fingers down on the crowd’s great hurts
and know there is no other knowing;
For giants grow larger
in contradiction; they
multiply in lies.


Michael Collins has published one book of poems, one intellectual biography and many uncollected essays and poems.

ELEMENTS: CUBIC ZIRCONIA

by Joan Colby

The authentic from the fake;
Even experts find it hard.
The man-made crystal
8.5 on the Mohs scale.
The diamond a perfect 10.

The naked eye cannot discern
Brilliance from brilliance.
The cheap version vs.
The blood diamond men die for.

Consider this ring: the 5 carat sparkler,
How it is envied
Or suspected.

The zircon entirely colorless
As a man without character.
The diamond leans into the prism
Of faint hues, like a man
Who still has doubts.

When it counts
Who can tell
The real glitter from the falsehood.
Facts of the matter
Or fake news.


Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, the new renaissance, Grand Street, Epoch, and Prairie Schooner. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards, Rhino Poetry Award, the new renaissance Award for Poetry, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She is the editor of Illinois Racing News, and lives on a small horse farm in Northern Illinois. She has published 11 books including The Lonely Hearts Killers and How the Sky Begins to Fall (Spoon River Press), The Atrocity Book (Lynx House Press), Dead Horses and Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press), and Properties of Matter (Aldrich Press). Colby is also an associate editor of Kentucky Review and FutureCycle Press.

CHRONICLES

by Judith Terzi

They are taking something away in America.
They have stolen all the cows in South Sudan.

They are hawking their egos on minor stages.
They have forced villagers to flee South Sudan.

They will forsake the poorest among us.
Their women cup hands in dust in South Sudan.

They will not succumb to offerings of reason.
Their women search for grain under straw in South Sudan.

They camouflage their fortunes under the radar.
They offshore in the West stolen assets from South Sudan.

They inhabit the wilderness of equivocation.
They create wastelands out of farms in South Sudan.

They speak in fiction to preserve potency.
They have massacred for power in South Sudan.

Now, they are taking compassion away in America.
Now, one hundred thousand facing famine in South Sudan.

Judith Terzi's poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in BorderSenses, Caesura, Columbia Journal, Raintown Review, Spillway, Unsplendid, and Wide Awake: The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Web and Net, shortlisted in the Able Muse Write Contest, and included in Keynotes, a study guide for the artist-in-residence program for State Theater New Jersey. Casbah is her latest chapbook from Kattywompus Press.

BLOOD, COFFEE, AND A COVERED LIFE

by Jill Crainshaw

Daily Signe Cartoon 03/14/17

The old hymn from my childhood pounds out
a heat-beating rhythm in my head.
“There is power, power,
wonder-working power
in the blood,”
while plasma charts a course
through octogenarian veins,
a crimson thread
marking a jagged line
between life and death.

“Here you go, honey,”
the Starbucks barista said
and her eyes smiled
while her mouth hid
behind one of those disposable face masks
medical center workers were wearing
that windy winter day.
I smiled back, took the potent elixir,
and drank,
as the dark roasted incense swirled.

Battle lines are drawn,
expiration date unknown but certain
as soon as womb-water breaks
onto unmapped territory.
“It could go either way,”
the hospitalist said.
“But it’s all covered.”
I Googled “hospitalist”
and waited
for a lingering red pearl to let go.

Jill Crainshaw is a professor at Wake Forest University School of Divinity and a Presbyterian minister. Her work has appeared in Star 82 Review, Mused: Bella Online Literary Review, and Panoplyzine. She is a frequent contributor to the Unfundamentalist Christians blog.

SONG OF 45

by Alejandro Escudé

I listen for the listener
in my darkened airplane of a home,
stars cycle within me, the sun blazes
as if it rose for me alone.
I twist clouds into euphemisms.
I’ve created my own celestial hive.
What you hear comes in sideways,
the voice in the voices of my advisors,
the little muses I carry in my pocket.
When I give orders, I perform a pirouette
to avoid the microphones hidden in
the molecules (they can do that I read).
Everything I sign will remain nameless.
The curtains are opened on purpose.


Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

SLEEP AFTER A T***P SPEECH

by Ben Kline 

What are facts if they lack
truth in telling? He was the bad lover I left

five weeks and sixty two months before
the March hail behaved like July and everyone

succumbed to citrus words and coral colored lip gloss
that shined like a silver watch in waters shallow

with guppies looking for a bite, barracudas
for purple blood so thick it shoved the sand

aside before his foot could find your throat.
What is the warning

shared by mothers on the beach
when their daughters spot men with cameras

walking too slowly by? He was brutal
but unskilled, a successful punch

lacking cause or defense like a tree
the wind sends onto a sleeping home

busy with inconsequential dreams, vivid truths
we only tell ourselves.

Ben Kline lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he writes about the modern digital existence and his dark Appalachian past. His work has appeared in KNACK Magazine, Headmaster Magazine, Birds Piled Loosely, and apt.

ACCOUNTABLE

Jim Hanson is a retired Senior Researcher at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale where he worked and taught in community development. He currently resides in the St. Louis area. He has a doctorate degree in sociology and is a lay-ordinated Zen Buddhist.