TWO NEW NEWS BROADCASTS

by Alice Twombly

                      I

The Evening News: July 4, 2018

A stag, with a full rack of antlers,

stands stationary on my front lawn  at dusk.

I run outside with my only weapon—

a mop still damp from washing the floor,

point it at him, shouting: Nothing.

I charge him, waving the wet rags back and forth, like a flag.

He moves a few feet away and stares at me.

I advance further, but each pause generates only

small indifferent changes. Finally, I run towards him screaming with all the energy

I possess. He bounds at last into the next yard,

turns for a final look, and disappears into the dark.

The next morning, I see what he had done before I’d noticed  him—

petals strewn everywhere, and every plant I’ve nurtured

all  summer, decapitated at the bud, eaten, and destroyed.

                            II

The Midday News: July 16, 2018

He sells the farm, the antiques and the wall hangings,

chases away the loyal dogs,

poisons the wells, floods the crops with leaded water,

jacks the flagpole, torches the flag

and takes down those old Post Magazine covers of the Four Freedoms

that had hung on the wall since World War 11.

Driving the landowners off their historic land

he buys it on the cheap,

and using the unskilled, dazzled, and defrauded labor that remains

begins erecting the first stages of the Putin Trump Tower

on the burnt fields of that defruited and polluted plain.

Alice Twombly is a teacher, photographer, poet, and political junky. A New Jersey resident, she curates a monthly poetry reading in Teaneck, NJ: “Thursdays Are For Poetry at Classic Quiche.” She teaches adults at The Learning Collaborative in New City, NY and lectures at local libraries. A member of “Brevitas,” an online poetry collective in NYC. Her work has been published in The New Jersey Poetry Monthly, First Literary Review-East, The Red Wheelbarrow, and Brevitas.

ORGASMO DE NEGOCIOS

by Ashton Jaymz

Cartoon by Jeff Darcy

White hoods give way to smiling white faces
Trim suits, white shirts, smooth in all the right places
Plantations give way to shimmering new offices
When you’re licking balls for status, you can't tell what a farce is
But it's all so shiny, neat, and clean
Your insides are all sanitized, so the dirt can't be seen
We're all fucktoys of a freshly printed bill
I'd die for a green orgasm, and let my tomb eat its fill


Ashton Jaymz is an English major currently residing in St. Louis, with a fondness for cigars and the theater.

ACUTE

by Barbara A Taylor




acute trumpitis  
the doctors’ surgeries
are overflowing

"Each day demands that I write and that my fingers touch and feel the earth." Barbara A Taylor's free verse poems, renku, haiga, haibun, award winning haiku, tanka, and other Japanese short form poetry appear in many international journals and anthologies on line and in print. She lives in the Rainbow Region, Northern NSW, Australia. Diverse poems with audio are here and here.

CONSTRUCTING A NEW LANGUAGE

by Megan Merchant

“Perhaps Trump is the ultimate gift to feminists: a grabber and bragger who has focused the world’s attention on the outrages women quietly endure on a chronic basis without notice. And perhaps we can now see the mid-90s response to Bill Clinton’s own accusers — subdued or defensive among liberals on account of his women-friendly politics — as a near miss of an opportunity, a cultural shift that could have built on the momentum of Anita Hill, but never did. The stories emerging about Trump, as well as his own words, could give women a new way of seeing their own experiences with sexual assault going forward — as part of a pattern of male behavior that has been noted, flagged and loudly denigrated.” —Susan, Dominus, The New York Times, October 13, 2016

There is a story that begins with a father
giving his son a bag of nails and instructions

to pound one into the fence with each flare of anger
and at first, there were more than three dozen,

then two, then a single day without a slip.
The son was proud, said “Dad, look.”

He nodded, continued “Now, for each day
you stay calm, pull a nail. What do you see ?”

A fence with scars.

And some in our country will say that’s
where the light gets through, or you won’t notice

if we build the fence bigger,
or the holes are there—get over it,

but the CDC has recorded that one in every five
women in our country is raped,

and that’s only what’s reported, their kits neatly
packaged, sit on a shelf, twenty deep to a bin.

The room stuffed with scars and swabs.
The nail hammered in, torn out.

And what if I told you that almost half
were before age eighteen. But numbers blur.

You think there can’t be that many, say hysteria,
drama, revenge, lying bitch.

So I ask, where does anger go ? If not packaged
in bullets and bombs, it stews in the mouth,

tingles down to hands. Drugs, rubs, robs.
Leaves holes.

Have you ever noticed the way women
walk in the dark ? Arms crossed over breasts,

clutching her body, because it is a thing that
can be taken.

If you are willing to listen,
you will learn the language of trauma.

A gospel of mirrors
and a man with a mouth full of nails

claiming words don’t matter. But they do.

Stories come into being to save lives.
To warn others from danger.

Anyone who has survived will tell you,

the human responsibility is to do more
than just listen.

Megan Merchant is mostly forthcoming. She is the author of two full-length poetry collections: Gravel Ghosts (Glass Lyre Press) The Dark’s Humming (Winner of the 2015 Lyrebird Prize, Glass Lyre Press, forthcoming 2017); four chapbooks and a forthcoming children’s book with Philomel Books. She lives in the tall pines of Prescott, Arizona.