SELLING OUT

by Orel Protopopescu

The sellout’s cards are selling out, 

the freakish cards of Don. 

No other president has shown 

such genius for a con!

 

Had Washington chopped up that tree

and sold each splintered share, 

he could have used a submarine 

to cross the Delaware!

 

And Lincoln never thought to sell 

real Lincoln Logs, it seems, 

too busy binding up a land

of violent extremes.   

 

But W may still have time 

to trump T’s licensees

by storing paintings of his toes

in polished NFTs.

Self-portrait by George W. Bush.

Orel Protopopescu has written prize-winning works for children and adults. She won the Oberon poetry prize in 2010 and 2020. Her light verse has appeared in Light Poetry Magazine, Lighten Up Online, and elsewhere. Her first biography Dancing Past the Light: The Life of Tanaquil Le Clercq (University Press of Florida, 2021) received a starred review in Library Journal. 

THE VICTRESS

by James Reiss   

Hillary Clinton by DonkeyHotey

    From Ronald
    to Donald
    politics
    sticks
    to people
    who sweep all                              
away with their tricks.

     The voters
     gun toters
     scope out Reeps
     not Bo-Peeps
     while the Dems
     with ahems                      
eye Al Gore–like veeps.

     But the winner
     a grinner
     more clever
     than ever
     won’t say Trump
     on the stump                                                        
is a dirtbag—never.

     As our prez
     she says  
     she’ll drink in                              
     Abe Lincoln
     standing straight
     while we state                  
Here’s to Hillary Clinton!

Spuyten Duyvil will release James Reiss’s debut novel, When Yellow Leaves, in September, and it will publish his second novel, Façade for a Penny Arcade, in 2017. He is the author of six full-length poetry books, including The Breathers, Ten Thousand Good Mornings, and Riff on Six: New and Selected Poems. His work has appeared in such places as The Atlantic, Esquire, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Poetry, Slate, and Virginia Quarterly Review. As Professor Emeritus of English at Miami University, he is Founding Editor of Miami University Press in Oxford, Ohio. His surname rhymes with “peace.”