JANUARY COUP

by Mark Danowsky

J.D. Crowe | jdcrowe@al.com

Vulgar 45, self-chosen wunder-king Insists he can take a life with a 45 Fifth Ave, broad daylight No one stops him Ha, as if he would stop himself Hang any henchmen Who defy a single wicked whim He begs you call him a joker A clown, a magician He calls himself master Of misdirection, of monopoly A game, he jests That one about life Behemoth of rage & spite Batter truth with lies Until truth cowers in a corner Smirk of feckless beast Mirror, mirror, what of this hair Send a few minions Storm the Capitol Torch the word of fair Suit of Big Mac & Diet Coke Asks only the McPoem be gilded 45 laughs & laughs Knowing a loss will be refused As only a loser can lose False god of the not unforsaken majority False demon elite who preys on the powerless He who claims to love what he loathes He who cannot sanitize what he is He who lets disease run rampant To disenfranchise those already wronged He who barks orders at the grotesque To carry out the obscene He who breaks the back of a thousand innocents To grease his palms in 18 holes Let us hope, yes, let us hope Some few brainwashed undrink the Kool-Aid There is no time like the present to accept Our past is full of atrocity And yes we can choose a new path Back towards democracy

Mark Danowsky is Editor-in-Chief of ONE ART: a journal of poetry, Senior Editor for Schuylkill Valley Journal, Poetry Craft Essays Editor for Cleaver Magazine, and a Regular Contributor for Versification. He is author of the poetry collection As Falls Trees (NightBallet Press) and JAWN forthcoming from Moonstone Press.

DEPARTURE

by Thomas R. Smith

January 20, 2021

The helicopter circling Washington

before the inauguration—what was it

really we were seeing in the sky over

the Capitol going farther away,

growing smaller in the eyes of the nation?

Almost pure archetype, the Unloved One

inflicting his unlovedness on the kingdom.

And perhaps nothing human could have changed that.

Too late, the damage done in the cradle

cemented, a secular damnation.

Everything ruined, everything fallen, and

worst of all nothing learned. I don’t want

to wallow in the pathos of that self-

inflicted doom. Far better to save our

tears for those four hundred thousand who

needn’t have died, and for the uncounted

number of injured he’s left in his wake.

Air Force One lifts off from Andrews

to the strains of “My Way,” a last bloody

handprint blazoned on the wall of ego.

It didn’t have to end this way.  Or more

terribly, maybe it did.  Do you

remember how Mary Shelley ended

Frankenstein? “He was soon borne away

by the waves and lost in distance and darkness.”

As the wind blows the clouds away from

the sun on a January day above

the Capitol, a helicopter like

a dark airborne wound grows smaller and

smaller until it can no longer be seen.

Thomas R. Smith is a poet and teacher living in River Falls, Wisconsin. He teaches at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. His most recent poetry collection is The Glory (Red Dragonfly Press).

DREAM OR NIGHTMARE

by George Held

1.

 

Is this dream or nightmare

from which we awaken?

 

Do we live still in the age of Frost

or T***p? The answer is debatable,

 

But our destiny is unknown: do we have

the strength to preserve our ever-

 

challenged democracy, the republic

for which "Old Glory" stands?

 

2.

 

The old, glorious words Hemingway

declared dead in The Great War

 

need renewal or replacement,

but how replace “honor,” “integrity,”

 

“truth”—just uttering that word

in the Senate after the Insurrection

 

earned Romney applause— when “disgrace,”

“fake,” and “disaster” still ring in our ears

 

and lesser poets fill Inauguration Day

with shibboleth and cliché?

3.

 

“The Gift Outright,” while not the poet’s best,

still provides us food for thought—

 

“The land was ours before we were the land’s…”—

 

as we waken from the four-year dream

or nightmare.

George Held is a longtime contributor to TheNewVerse.News.

MEDICAL EXPERTISE IN A TIME OF CORONAVIRUS

by Alan Catlin

Photo by Samuel Corum <@corumphoto>, July 9, 2020

Highly recommended
and “very impressive”
says COVID-45
medical Doctor
Stella Immanuel
who touts,

“Real-life ailments such as fibroid
tumors and cysts stem from the
demonic sperm after demon dream sex.”

Assures us that
hydroxychloroquine
is an effective curative
despite irrefutable evidence
to the contrary.

Is poised to make
Rosemary’s Baby
the official movie
of the White House
and decrees everyone
should watch it,

treat it as fact.

Pool reporters
ask if COVID-45
auditioned for
the part of sequel,
Baby All Grown Up

“I didn’t have to
audition.” 45 says.


Alan Catlin has published dozens of chapbooks and full-length books, including the chapbook Three Farmers on the Way to a Dance (Presa Press), a series of ekphrastic poems responding to the work of German photographer August Sander who did portraits of Germans before, during, and after both World Wars.

45

by Gil Hoy

Members of a family reunite through the border wall between Mexico and United States, during the "Keep our dream alive" event, in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua state, Mexico on December 10, 2017. Families separated by the border were reunited for three minutes through the fence that separates Ciudad Juarez Park in Mexico and Sunland in New Mexico, United States, during an event called "Keep our dream alive", organized by the Border Network for Human Rights on the International Human Rights Day. HERIKA MARTINEZ/AFP/GETTY IMAGES via Texas Public Radio

In this poem, proper sentence 

structure will be followed.

For example, sentences will start

with a capital letter and end

with a proper punctuation mark.

Sentences will be grammatically correct.

Some may say that this will likely detract 

from the poem’s poetic quality,

but I’m not sure I can agree.

I’m also not sure real poems require words. 

I italicize for emphasis.

For example, is an image held 

in the mind of crying children—

of thousands of immigrant families

separated at the border—never

to be reunited, poetic?

Is the image symbolic and evokes

strong emotions? Is it repetitive 

and sick at heart?

Are the precise words of one’s 

internal dialogue describing the image 

what make it poetic or not?

Can a number be a poem, or at least poetic?

Such as the title of this poem?

I will never think of “45” in the same way again.

Gil Hoy is a Boston poet and semi-retired trial lawyer who studied poetry at Boston University through its Evergreen program. Hoy previously received a B.A. in Philosophy and Political Science from Boston University, an M.A. in Government from Georgetown University, and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. He served as a Brookline, Massachusetts Selectman for four terms. Hoy’s poetry has appeared most recently in Chiron Review, TheNewVerse.News, Ariel Chart, Social Justice Poetry, Poetry24, Right Hand Pointing/One Sentence Poems, I am not a silent poet, The Potomac, Clark Street Review, the penmen review and elsewhere.