BRILLIANT

by Katherine Smith

Bruce MacKinnon editorial cartoon February 10, 2022.

The best moment of my day

happened two hours after

I packed my black puppy into the car

when I screamed yes!

when the guy from triple A turned the key in the jammed lock,

a fine moment for human ingenuity. Twenty minutes later

I was driving down the Beltway behind a thousand trucks, a banquet

of American flags rippled from the empty cabs

of eighteen wheelers, a freightless load

of freedom fluttered in the exhaust filled air.

My puppy whimpered in the back seat.

Horns honked. Don’t tread on me,

in brilliant yellow, the red maple leaf

of Canadians blurred the air. On the overpasses

a few lone bodies waved as the trucks drove under.

I searched for my exit. Put my hand in the back seat to comfort the puppy

headed away from the capitol towards the country.

 

I am afraid of stupidity

whether it is driving an empty truck

around the Beltway at rush hour

to protest a mask mandate

while fuel is 4 and a half dollars a gallon

while people are dying in Ukraine

or a student is crying because she has 85 0000

of student loan debt. I didn’t used to be so judgmental

when I had more stupid of my own

when I fled my friends to meet a lover in Boston

whom they despised for good reason

and ruined my life for a couple of years. No one minds

their own stupid even when it distracts them

from the fact that people are dying. Even when I,

a woman who happens to be perfectly sensible today

looks at the convoy

and knows in her bones

that this is what stupid looks like. I keep driving away.

Maybe brilliance is nothing more than enough

hopeless blindness to kill the world

everywhere for everyone. Still,

when I get out of the car the sweetness

of daffodils spills through the air. So far human ingenuity

hasn’t reached the mountain or the reflection

of the moon in the James River.

Katherine Smith’s recent poetry publications include appearances in Boulevard, North American Review, Mezzo Cammin, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and many other journals. Her short fiction has appeared in Fiction International and Gargoyle. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003. Her second book of poems Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press) appeared in 2014. She works at Montgomery College in Maryland.

C'ÊST COLLATERAL DOMMAGE

by Myron Pulier

“So ‘the book of collateral damage’ is this project that the bookseller in Baghdad is working on, but it's almost an impossible project because he wants to document, minute-by-minute, everything that gets destroyed [in the 2003 bombing of Iraq by the United States]. And the objects themselves tell their story, but he never gets beyond the first minute. ... The narrator tells him this requires an institution, and the bookseller tells him there are no institutions anymore, and I'm alone ... it might sound like an insane project, but someone has to do it.” —Sinan Antoon, author of The Book of Collateral Damage, a novel due out in paperback in April 2020, speaking on NPR, July 9, 2019.

No rhyme will tell all
names of those who fell fore telling
the fortune that befell
upon their just
deserts below the Belt
Way’s subdominant inner
circle of force
majeur subject due
with all retrospect to
unforeseen circumstances


Myron Pulier is a clinical professor of psychiatry at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School.

THE LOYAL OPPOSITION

by Ann Reisfeld Boutté






That noble tradition
born in nineteenth century England
has, in the twenty-first century,
gone the way of Yellow Pages,
paper maps and pay phones.
Once happy warriors,
inspired orators in search
of lofty ideas, our leaders
have succumbed to the lure
of wealth and power,
slithered into the politics of
character demonization and
look-into-the-camera lies.
Toxic fallout has oozed
beyond the Beltway, infiltrating
Red State/Blue State cities
and towns, workplaces, churches,
clubs and families. Old and dear
friends, cousins, siblings, even
parents and children, whipped into
frenzies of righteous indignation
and unable to bridge the divide,
have unceremoniously forsworn
topical discussions.  Both sides,
firmly rooted in warring camps,
yearn for and dread the
inevitable reckoning,
I told you so.


Ann Reisfeld Boutté is a writer of poetry, essays, and feature stories. Her work has appeared in many publications including The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume IV, Texas Poetry Calendars, and Wingbeats: Exercises & Practice in Poetry. She has a Master’s Degree in journalism and has worked as a feature writer for a national wire service. She was a Juried Poet in the Houston Poetry Fest in 2001, 2005, 2009 and 2010.