TRUMP IS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT, AGAIN

by Susan Cossette

Photograph by Mark Wilson / Getty via The New Yorker

It is Wednesday, 

another happy hour at the Chesterbird American Legion.
 
The usual suspects of retirees, widows, 
and slumming white collar workers shuffle in
to claim a spot at the sticky bar, 
a creaky chair at a wobbly table.
We buy bingo tickets, pull tabs, and cheese curds.
 
Tonight, the MAGA hats return,
worn bent brims, sweat stains on the cap.
Bearded men in Carhart workpants take selfies,
drink cheap American beer.
 
Make America Great and Glorious Again.
Gloating, they wait for new, improved, hats.
 
In the meantime, they disparage the “fucking Jews”
and the snowflake liberals.
 
In 1943, my Aunt Theresa was deported to Auschwitz,
greeted by Josef Mengele.
His leather crop pointed right, 
she went to the barracks.
Her head and pubic hair shaved by male SS.
She was 15.
 
Everyone who went right got the Zyklon B, 
her parents included.
Tourists regard the fingernail scratches on the cement walls 
under false shower heads.
 
I pay my bill, quietly,
tap one red-hat man on the shoulder
and tell him this story
and that perhaps he needs to reconsider hate speech
in public spaces 
because you never know who might be listening.

Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust and Moth, The New York Quarterly, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, The New Verse News, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Fast Fallen Women (Woodhall Press) and Tuesdays at Curley’s (Yuganta Press).

PRAY

by Jean Varda

This video contains black and white footage after the liberation of Buchenwald.

I light a candle for peace and everywhere I go I pray

in my room on my bed on the street in my car,

when I breathe each inhalation is an image of hope

that the bombs will stop falling, the tanks will turn around no nukes will rain down, and those who are fleeing will reach safety and not die on their way.

How can one bear the thought of the little girl in blood

stained pajamas her mother running with her for help

then dying when she reached the hospital.

Even before I was born my mother protested war,

after the horrors of serving as a nurse in WWII

“How could they have kept from us Buchenwald,

Auschwitz, Treblinka?” She would repeat as she showed

me black and white footage of the camps and told me

how lucky I was to be born where I was with my Jewish

blood. She took me on my first peace march to protest

Vietnam, we stayed up all night on an old school bus,

I had never seen so many people at one time

as we marched on Washington.

My father taught me the Russians weren’t our enemies

that they wanted peace just like we did.

It didn’t match what I learned in school. He went to Cuba and Nicaragua, he loved the countries and the people. He was accused of being a Communist before I was born. I took my daughters to protests when they were small and showed them what I believed in, 

still we pray for peace.

          

Jean Varda's poetry has appeared in: The California Quarterly, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Third Wednesday, Speckled Trout, The New Verse News, and The Boston Literary Magazine. She has led poetry writing workshops and Open Mics around the country. She presently resides in Chico, California where she is working on an anthology of her poetry.

HOLOCAUST TRAIN

a poem found in the words of Janina Iwanska

by Howie Good

Janina Iwanska, 89, is photographed in her Warsaw apartment. She was sent to Auschwitz after she was separated from her parents at the age of 14 during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 when the Nazis laid siege to the city. She arrived at the death camp at the height of its exterminations, when the SS guards killed 330,000 people in a span of eight weeks. —Rob Schmitz/NPR, January 27, 2020

We were put into open train cars
and huddled together to keep warm.

When it snowed, we collected it
to drink, because they didn't give us

water. We were in such complete
solidarity that when one of us fell

asleep standing (there was no room
to sit or lie down) none of the others

would steal the snow that accumulated
on her. That snow belonged to her.

Howie Good is the author most recently of Stick Figure Opera: 99 100-word Prose Poems from Cajun Mutt Press. He co-edits the online journals Unbroken and UnLost.

CRADLESONG

by Mark Tarren

"Far-right European governments launch plan to take over EU with anti-immigration ‘axis.’" —The Independent (UK), January 11, 2019

Today

children are awakened by the scent
of orange peel, coffee,
melted butter on toast.

In the hazelnut light
a father carries his son
upon his shoulders.

A mother lifts her infant's
head to her breast.

Kolysanka

She sings a lullaby for her history.

Today

the Nazis invaded Poland —

A mother rests her hand on
her son’s cheek for the final time.

A father is executed just outside
his home of forty years.

A grandfather is thrown
from his balcony,
still seated
in his wheelchair.

A daughter’s innocence is forcibly taken.
A son becomes a shadow.

Today

in a darkened cinema
there are hands searching for faces,
the secret language of lovers
retreating from the threat of the world.

An ear to a radio show in a sunroom.

A moist thumb to the page
of a comic book.

Chopin’s Marche funèbre
crackles into the night.

Today

a mother and child undress to shower
for the last time.

The faint smell of bitter almonds.

They hear the Berceuse,
the gentle sounds of departure
and return

as a wrist is tattooed in Auschwitz—
the calligraphy of nationalism.

Today

a finger swipes a touchscreen.

A small grave is dug
for a small body
after dying in
the arms of America.

A bullet enters a skull
to escape the walls around
our worlds.

These are the holes left by fascism.

So now we place our lives
in the communal

Book of Forgetting;
moving forward into the past.

For the stars died long ago,
all of us asleep;
under that dead light.


Mark Tarren is a poet and writer based in Queensland, Australia. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various literary journals including TheNewVerse.News, The Blue Nib, Poets Reading The News, Street Light Press, Spillwords Press and Tuck Magazine.

POLITICAL POETRY IN THE AGE OF THE TWITTER KING

by George Salamon

". . . time lost even at the U.. studying poetry and French and subjects that never brought anybody a cent." —Babbitt in Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt (1922).


What links poetry to politics?

Once political poems eulogized
Rulers and heroes.
We can no longer celebrate our rulers.
For they are hucksters and hustlers.
We write poetry about them
On accepted topics
Of outrage and  opposition,
Banning nuance and grace.
Poetry deals with eternal values,
While wearing its social badge.
Americans expect poetry to deliver
Inspiration or consolation.
When poetry stripped authority
Of its mythical cloak, it danced
To an anarchist muse,
More criticism than inspiration,
Seeing the world as does a child
In a Grimm fairy tale.
We were told, not long ago,
"After Auschwitz, no more poetry."
This bad advice was ignored, as poets
Listened instead to poets before them.
Poets are good disciples, still today,
But what happened to their antennas
For sensing the future?


George Salamon lives and writes in St. Louis, MO, where the American Dream met the New Global Economy and lost Round One.

ENTRENCHMENT

by Lynnie Gobeille

This old woman lost all her power after reaching Turkey coming from Syria, on September 30, 2014. NurPhoto via Getty Images via Huff Post.

Having showered—I remove the bandages.
Look closely at the hallowed out skin.
I see the burnt spots
The singed flesh left
From the Doctor’s biopsy.
Note the spot she cauterized
To stop the bleeding.
Left with the memory of the scent
Like nothing I’d ever smelled before—

“Burning flesh” she said—
“has a distinct odor."

I go all Auschwitz; all Jewess
All checking my arm
For the tell-tale tattoo.
To be clear here:
I am not crazy.
For one moment I felt the fear . . .
The absolute awareness
Of the harm
One Human can inflict upon another.
In that one second of olfactory recognition
I understood why my grandmother changed her last name.

Came to America
My mother in tow.

Lynnie Gobeille is passionate about poetry.

MS. D AND THE FINAL THREE

by Lee Patton

She’s alone as usual at the far table in the teachers’ lunch room--
I stall, holding my tray, wondering if today will be the day
I join Ms. D, but Cheryl Sitkow groans at the rain-snow mix
through the staff room window, hoping to lure me into her tale.
“Reminds me of this time last year, Spring break, when we took
our kids to Poland.  Mist and fog and chilly rain every day.
We could barely tell the cathedrals of Krakow from the barracks
at Auschwitz, honestly.  All a gray blur. The kids were so bored.
My sisters kept asking if we could abandon the tour
and catch a  southbound train to the Riviera beaches.”

“What you get, Sitkow, trying to have an educational vacation,”
says Gary Schmidt, brown-bagging it with the other guys from PE.
“Geez, you’re such a history nerd.”  Gary turns to suffer
over his brackets, ratcheting down his hopes for the Final Four.
“If Kentucky doesn’t do any better next time, I’m personally flying
over there to kick their bluegrass asses.  That goes double
for my brother, who’s got double the money on the semi-finals.”

Fawn Lopez, the new Spanish teacher, joins Cheryl, despondent
at the window.  “My grandma says all this moisture means one thing.
Lawns to mow. Weeds to pluck.  Mud.  Can we put a stop to spring?”

Que lastima, I mutter, moving past. I bring my lunch tray to Ms. D’s
vicinity.  She smiles her slow, sad smile, nodding toward a chair.
 “I know why you avoid us, Ms. D,” I say, “all we do is kvetch.”

“It’s not so bad,” she says. “We’re all just stressed, blowing steam.
What about you?  Do you have grand plans for Spring Break?”

“Family stuff,” I sigh. “My cousins and I are driving my godmother
to Palm Springs to escape the rain.  Not real exciting, I’m afraid.”

“Sounds nice,” says Ms. D.  “Maybe you and your cousins can party
while she’s asleep.  And the desert sun is going to be heavenly.”
I warm up, dreaming about the margaritas we plan to blend
the minute we get there.  Then I ask her what she’d be up to.
“I’ll just stay close by my folks, as usual.”  I ask why, stunned
when she opens up to me at last.  She didn’t really have any one
besides her parents. No siblings, no cousins, no aunts, no uncles.
No grandparents.  “Just we three.”  Her folks, she says, were still babies
when they were hatched in separate camps, the only survivors
hung on each family tree. “A relief program brought them
to the States.  All they had were each other, and then me.”  

I remember all the times I’d seen Ms. D staring out, days
like this, to these chilly drizzles that follow blitzkrieg blizzards,
when March cedes to April’s peace, days the earth seems to yearn
for a treaty. She barely touches the Tuna Surprise on her cafeteria tray.
Granting her abashed smiles and polite hellos to us, drifted
to the farthest corner, Ms. D always abides the nearby noise,
this endless griping about all of our gifts.

Lee Patton, a Denverite, writes fiction, poetry, drama and commentary.   Quarterlies that have published his work include Best New Writing 2012, The Threepenny Review, The Massachusetts Review, The California Quarterly,  Poetry Quarterly, Ellipsis, Hawaii-Pacific Review, Adirondack Review and Memoir Journal. His third novel, My Aim Is True, was launched in 2015 from Dreamspinner Press.