BEHIND THE MILLION DOLLAR AD

by Devon Balwit

Believe in something even if it means sacrificing

everything. We read the words, and that part of us

suckled on tales of heroes rallies as behind a pennant

on the battlefield or before splintering city gates

                                                            —and yet

we are reading ad copy, a sly way to light a match

beneath our purchasing power. Fight the machine,

we’re prompted by the machine itself, so vast

as to be almost invisible.

                                                            —a galaxy

of nodes. This time, proceeds go to charity,

yet still we wouldn’t trade places with a worker

in this corporation’s factories, live off their wage,

raise children by their dumps. How deep does good go?

                                                            —How deep

is deep enough? Better than nothing,

some insist. With eyes keen enough to see

such a fraction, we must trace the whole web,

alert to its snag, the hypnotic vibration as the spider

                                                            —approaches

Devon Balwit has six chapbooks and three collections out in the world. Her individual poems can be found here or are forthcoming in journals such as The Cincinnati Review, apt, Posit, Cultural Weekly, Triggerfish, Fifth Wednesday, The Free State Review, Rattle, Poets Reading the News, etc.

A SACRED RITE: WHEN ATHLETES KNEEL

by Sister Lou Ella Hickman

                                it could have been genuflections in a church
                                but there was no stained glass    no pews
                                yet they knelt in a presence greater themselves
                                a silence    a sanctuary    on a field  
                               now a battle wages using words that pelt like stones
                                that cannot comprehend
this sacred moment   this most protected of all rights
                                to dissent     to kneel    to stand    to risk it all

Sister Lou Ella Hickman has been an all-level teacher and a librarian. Presently she is a freelance writer and a spiritual director. Her poems and articles have been widely published in numerous magazines. One of her poems was published in the anthology After Shocks: Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events edited by Tom Lombardo. Her first book of poetry she: robed and wordless, published by Press 53, was released in the fall of 2015.

A PANTOUM MORASS OF SOCIAL MORES

by Joe Amaral 

“He’s winning this. His critics are losing. We’re better for it.” —Tim Kawakami, The (San Jose) Mercury News, September 7, 2016. KHARTOON! by Khalid.

                                                for Colin Kaepernick


They sack their own hypocritical souls,
judging a biracial man sitting down between
Gatorade coolers, bench warmer, while
standing in safe zones chanting anthems.

Character assassinating a person-
hostile when their comfortable tedium
is knelt upon during an incomplete poem,
overheated, entwined in symbolic confliction.

Dislodged from routine surroundings, habits
of public conformity become glare and troll;
despite loafing when the flag waves on private
TV: bloviating from couches about abstract duty.

In my Catholic days I swung suffocating incense
before hearing the priest who married my parents
molested little boys. We spurned the cross in peace.
Pleas from true patriots are treated with violence.

Some only meme, righteous as sacramental fire
while buying foreign cars, clothes and smartphones
made by slave labor, then pout: THANKS OBAMA!
Colin audibles brave; to Hail Mary the fallow loam

of this country, as American as freedom can be, calling
to the knee-jerks and neutrals, even to the haters,
for a healing conversation amongst culpable toxicity—
warming a bench for enemies to connect, sit,
and see.

Joe Amaral likes to spelunk around the California central coast as a paramedic and stay-at-home dad. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in 3Elements Review, Arcadia Magazine, Crow Hollow 19, Writers of the Portuguese Diaspora, Zingara Poet and other awesome places. Joe won the 2014 Ingrid Reti Literary Award. He also hiked Mount Kilimanjaro. It was epic.