HURRICANE WATCH, NEW ORLEANS

by Gail White

Mon., Aug. 30: Children watch reporters at a building collapse scene in New Orleans. Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Someday only the divers

will visit New Orleans.

The church bells will ring under water.

Kelp will encircle the rusting wrought iron

like Mardi Gras beads.

The round-eyed fish will roam free

with no one to cook them with almonds.

Drinks are not on the house now, but under the sea.

Politics cause no fights. Who wins doesn’t matter.

The artists are gone. The rich and the homeless are gone.

The old jazz musicians have shut up their instrument cases

I will be one of the few to remember the days

of white-powdered beignets and coffee at Jackson Square,

and Jackson himself on a rearing horse tipping his hat.

And the bells of St. Louis Cathedral

will ring for mass under the sea.

Gail White is a formalist poet and a contributing editor to Light. Her most recent collections are Asperity Street and Catechism. She lives in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, with her husband and cats. 

ON THE MONEY

by Lee Patton

The Harriet Tubman $20 was a redesign plan, advanced during the Obama administration, that was supposed to have rolled out in 2020 to mark the centennial anniversary of the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote. That plan, like so many others for the year, has been shelved, and one of the reasons given for the delay was concerns over counterfeit security. The new Tubman $20 is now set at the earliest for 2028. Of course, Tubman enthusiasts and those supporting feminism and racial justice have been rightly suspicious that this is the actual reason for delaying the redesign, given the current administration’s lack of interest in race and gender equality, not to mention the president’s actions in hanging a portrait of Andrew Jackson—the seventh U.S. president, who currently fronts the $20—in the Oval Office while recently refusing to unveil a portrait of Obama, the first black U.S. president and his predecessor. Symbols and symbolic actions matter.Nonetheless, does a Tubman $20 matter as a symbol? There will be those who will say Harriet Tubman on the $20 would not have changed the circumstances leading to the death of George Floyd. But consider this. George Floyd was killed over an imagined counterfeit $20 in a country that can’t keep its promise to place Tubman on the $20, counterfeit security issues or otherwise. Which is the real counterfeit here? George Floyd’s $20, Harriet Tubman’s $20 redesign or a country that still pretends there is “liberty and justice for all”? —Janell Hobson, Ms., June 16, 2020

A genocidal maniac stares back at us
on our twenty dollar bill—native killer,
ethnic cleanser extraordinaire. Plans to put
a slave liberator in his place got erased—

Miss Tubman, ever poised for glory, will
not suffice. Our leader admires the killer,
even placed his portrait to grace his office.
Franklin and Hamilton, our currency’s

sole non-presidents, were at least fun guys—Ben,
teenaged runaway, Alex, Caribbean bastard—
but unlike civilized lands, we have no artists,
no philosophers, no scientists on our cash.

Our basic buck poses an honest slavemaster—
zealot of forced labor, profit, and the lash.

Lee Patton, a Denverite, writes fiction, poetry, drama and commentary.  His newest novel Every Summer Day is in pre-release from Bold Strokes Books.

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.

DIKTAT

by Rick Mullin 

Now that the Novus Ordo’s nouveau riche,
we might knock out a memo to the mint:
No more Latin double-talk—Capiche?

Recast the pyramid-and-eye pastiche
with something more like winking or a squint.
Now that the Novus Ordo’s nouveau riche,

the barn door open, Fido off the leash,
and Andrew Jackson nearly out-of-print,
let’s drop the Latin double-talk. Capiche?

Annuit Co-eptis? I mean, sheesh!
Pronunciation’s a perdickamint
now that the Novus Ordo’s nouveau riche.

Pardon my French, but Real Men Don't Eat Quiche,
a motto writ in stone, though not on flint,
would trump the Latin double-talk. Capiche?

In English. Send it out today, Rajneesh
(In God We Trust can stay. They’ll get the hint):
Now that the Novus Ordo’s nouveau riche
there’s no more Latin double-talk. Capiche?


Rick Mullin is the author of four volumes of poetry, including Sonnets from the Voyage of the Beagle, and Soutine, both published by Dos Madres Press, Loveland, OH. His work has appeared in various journals, including The New Criterion, Measure, Ep;phany, and American Arts Quarterly, and in anthologies, including Irresistible Sonnets (Headmistress Press) and the forthcoming Rabbit Ears: The First Anthology of Poetry About TV (New York Quarterly Books).