ALL IN THE FAMILY

by Alan Walowitz

Maybe you wake up cranky again, 

and the sun’s unwelcome as ever

through the broken slat in the blinds.

You holler across the hall, 

You’ve got to make something of your life.

Then, he hardly stirs when you go to shake him, 

but he tells you of his plan to kill you.

There’s no use talking it out.

No coming to some understanding.

He means it this time 

 

Sometimes, I get crazy thoughts myself—

I’m too old for this. 

What’s left of my youth

has leached out slow like air from a tire. 

How murder is where we come from, 

Cain and Abel, the Flood, and then the Golden Calf—

which was only a sign of our shared impatience.   

 

So, you take him to some tangled place

and it all unwinds like a movie,

part of you watching, and part of you 

present in a way you’ve never been.

Maybe you’re hoping some voice intervenes.

You’d gladly call it God, if the script requires, 

though you’re probably considering the headlines, 

the generations to come who might never understand. 

Or, perhaps, there is no voice. 

and it's just you, come to your senses. 

 

No matter. Chances are he’ll only remember 

a trip to the country, just a kid and his dad.

A nice enough day, the story might go, 

except for maybe this cheap device

that never would solve anything: 

the bleat of another innocent animal,  

caught in the brambles, ready or not,

to take our place.

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 Story of the Milkman and Other Poems  is available from Truth Serum Press.  From Arroyo Seco Press,  In the Muddle of the Night, written with poet Betsy Mars.  The chapbook The Poems of the Air is from Red Wolf Editions and is free for downloading. 

LIFE IN THE SUBURBS

by Alan Walowitz

I head off to pick up my meds,  

how I stay steady these uneasy days: 

Children going without. 

The Court implies he can shoot at will  

on the seas—and maybe where I walk?  

In time, he’ll get around to us. 

It’s warm enough these mid-Autumn days, 

but the early dark reminds the cold to come.  

 

When she sees my sunken countenance, 

the second time this week,  

the clerk says, beneath her breath, as is her way,  

A Higher Power will make it better soon. 

I suppose she means God, or the pharmacist, her boss, 

who doesn’t care or hear so much. 

Listen, she says to make herself clear,  

her forefinger waggling like a broken metronome:  

A bullet doesn’t graze someone’s ear 

not to make this world a better place.  

 

I tell her, gently, he’s still a crook, 

while she packs my pills.   

Everybody steals, she says,  

as if she gets the inside dope, 

dispensing meds to old guys like me. 

She reminds me, You live another day,  

it’s pretty much the same as stealing. 

Then, hands me my change and says, 

See you soon. Dismissal as wisdom.   

but I hope, this time, exactly what she means.  

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 Story of the Milkman and Other Poems  is available from Truth Serum Press.  From Arroyo Seco Press,  In the Muddle of the Night, written with poet Betsy Mars.  The chapbook The Poems of the Air is from Red Wolf Editions and is free for downloading. 

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.

HELP ME, JOE

by Alan Walowitz

I’m not the handiest man
though sometimes feel the need to prove I am—
at least among those still extant in my demographic
who might be foolish enough to wield a screwdriver 
a couple of  feet in the air
and intend to get close enough to what needs tightening.
Though not mistaken for the Wallendas
who repair the skylight when it won’t close right.
Or that D.B. Cooper guy I hire to change the bulbs
in the fixture that hangs a hundred feet in the air
from my foolish cathedral ceiling. 
You know, it’s been a while since
I climbed to the top rung. 
I’m happier watching from the ground
and telling those youngsters 
everything they’re doing wrong
and how I would’ve handled it
way back when, a couple of year before. 
Though I do remember from being up there, 
the thrill of the heights
I know when you fall, you hit with a thud.
Meantime, help me, Joe. 
Hold this ladder, will you? 
For this young one—
willing, ready  to climb up.

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.

GRAVITY WILL GET US

by Alan Walowitz

“Just last night, there were shots fired outside of Temple Israel in Albany. And just yesterday, the menorah of Chabad Sunset Park in Brooklyn was vandalized.”  —Mayor Eric Adams, December 8, 2023

Some of us are willing to wait
till our native caution fails  
on the worn and slippery stairs.
No matter our disparate falls 
in the garden, or the desert, the reclaimed land,
or holding the safe door tight, 
against the next volley.  
It all becomes so much the same
in the short history of you and me. 
Today it’s news, tomorrow we’re gone. 
Who has the will to study and learn,
as Torah demands, such a short stay?.   
 
Everyone’s bound to fall,
even the lithe and balletic among us 
give way to age and our own sad shuffling.
Some will make a thud when we hit the ground, 
some a noise of lesser note,
as we learn, again, as if we didn’t know, 
this is not a movie. 
No shot, no bang, no dying fall.
Sometimes a shatter will sound
before we get the sharp reminder
what the slimmest shard might do.
 
Let me hide in plain sight long as I can—
I’ll agree to shut my mouth for now.
My forebears knew how to sound grateful,
and content, the price for being taken in. 
But one dyspeptic uncle, always a stranger,
warned never to feel safe—even here,
in The Golden Land.
Hah! his voice-- though not heard for years--
now rings like an alarm in my ears:
Boychik, you just wait and see. 

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.

PRAYER FOR THE NON-BELIEVER

by Alan Walowitz

Romano-British iron ploughshare. Flat bar with rounded edges tapering to an asymmetrical point at one end, with a flanged socket at the other. —The British Museum

C’mon, we can pray as well as anyone
If we only suspend our disbelief and try. 
The bombs are dropping on a hospital
So we pray, at least, it wasn’t us. 
Is that too much?  Not enough?  If so,
Then let’s go all the way
And pray that the bombs will stop,
Let them be bursting in air, 
The way we’ve always sung 
About them since the time we were young.
 
Or better yet,
Beaten into ploughshares. 
Though we’ve never known what ploughshares are,
Oh, God, if you’re out there, I swear,
I’m gonna call Amazon and order some.


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.

CLEARVIEW AI

by Alan Walowitz

So the way it works is that you upload someone's face—a photo of someone—to the Clearview AI app, and then it will return to you all the places on the internet where that person's face has appeared, along with links to those photos. —Kashmir Hill, author, Your Face Belongs to Us, on Fresh Air, September 28, 2023

 

The haze stalls long enough

to allow us to continue our work:

to make ourselves seem here, and not here,

in equal measure—to assure anonymity

yet convince the world, and us, we’re real.

Our wish to be seen, but not a target,

of the law or of derision.

Though it might be wise to wear bright colors

when we walk among the trees.

 

The sun in our eyes or an unsteady hand

might account for any low resolution,

what the app might call, Failure to recognize. 

Still, we might someday desire

to see the face from our dreams,

who’s bound to be found, among the billions

of images kept in the cloud

for moments when we’re lonely.

 

No one owns our face, we claim,

not the sun, or the trees, or the gently bleeding sky

where our image has been scraped from the assorted

public places we’ve foolishly lent ourselves.

This the price for being bound to this planet?

Though, in the end, perhaps a Court will claim,

we had no inherent interest being here. 

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.

OH, TO BELONG

by Alan Walowitz

Russia has expanded its list of sanctioned Americans in a tit-for-tat retaliation for the latest curbs imposed by the United States. But what is particularly striking is how much President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is adopting perceived enemies of former President Donald J. Trump as his own. —The New York Times, May 21, 2023

I want to get on that Russia-list.

To be among those who can’t go to Moscow—

would be so Chekhovian, bittersweet

not to see the Cyrillic sights, or trade in  

Gazprom futures, or pass gas in Red Square.

Here in the Times is a list of my peeps, my peers—

the Jews, the odd, the Kleptocrat wannabes, 

the comedians, the gays, the left-wingers, a few right

who despise George Santos, his lies which

make them queasy, though wonder at how easy. 

Some who grew up in Brighton, or 108th in Queens—

and here a Huckabee from Arkansas, 

notorious for lying herself. 

And others, much kinder, smarter—

actors, heiresses, entrepreneurs, free-thinkers

who submit clever Shouts to The New Yorker,

most never to be heard

except for an occasional squint 

through that imperious monocle.

All of us who would have been

red diaper-babes once upon a time

whose mothers never lived to see the day

our names had made the Russia-list 

in The New York Times.

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.

A POEM IN FAVOR OF REMAINING PURPOSEFUL IN DARK TIMES

by Alan Walowitz

It’s late here, afternoon, and for all I know

the solstice might have come and gone.

Another of these sodden days

keeps me in my sleep-clothes—Gatkes,

my mother might say, a little Yiddish

meant to make things light

and shame me into the fray we’ve made

of forced boredom and too much sleep.

 

Not much happening before Christmas,

the true-believers at the mall, avoiding one another

as if they want to remain alive.

Still, here they are in droves

to address our national debt

and resuscitate mankind’s collective desire;

the National Guard poised to calm the streets

so I won’t have to worry the neighbor’s rage:

my leaves blown carelessly on his lawn again;

the cops have promised not to kill anymore.

Why not walk aimlessly around

masked and dazed by the beauty of the Christmas lights?

Underutilized, my own daughter says of me,

though it’s not how I was raised.

 

The moon was part of us once

before it was hoisted and fastened above

and later assigned to werewolves and love--

though we know we’re done with that.

But now the moon, risen low in the sky,

and twice as bright comes into its own --

holding out against any wobble,

any sudden tilt of the earth.

The Sun, that old Palooka,

means to cook us alive and swallow us whole.

Still, the moon remains, attached to the tides,  

and even in times like these,

determined to do its little job, 

whether or not it’s to any avail.

 

Meanwhile, let's not forget to attend to ours.  

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.