NOT

by Laura Rodley





It’s not OK that Covid lurks
on sheet metal, lingers in lungs,
six hour window between tenants
in vacation rentals, disinfecting all
surfaces, holding onto our face masks.
It’s not OK I cannot see the stranger’s
face to know what they are saying,
who they are, if they might be safe or not.
It’s not OK that school might not
start up again and all rights of passage,
hallmarked by the start of school
in September, college, the rights of passage
are now given over to the power
of the internet, now zoomed into outer
space—are we being recorded? Who is
mapping our thoughts? It is as though
all the ways we knew how to live
and be kind, follow the markers, each right
of passage has left us with an earth
that’s flat, no longer round: what if Columbus
never sailed the seas, he drowned in them,
it was someone else who discovered America
and it was not someone looking for gold.
It was discovered by accident,
and no one was taken prisoner.

Laura Rodley, Pushcart Prize winner, is a quintuple Pushcart Prize nominee, and quintuple Best of Net nominee. Finishing Line Press nominated her Your Left Front Wheel Is Coming Loose for a PEN L.L.Winship Award and Mass Book Award. FLP also nominated her Rappelling Blue Light for a Mass Book Award. Former co-curator of the Collected Poets Series, until Covid-19, Rodley taught the As You Write It memoir class for 12 years.  She edited and published As You Write It, A Franklin County Anthology volumes I-VI, also nominated for a Mass Book Award. Latest books Turn Left at Normal by Big Table Publishing and Counter Point by Prolific Press.

WALT WHITMAN AT THE 2016 OLYMPICS

by Bob Katrin

O for any and each the body correlative and attracting.
Singing the muscular urge and the blending…
the welcome nearness… the sight of the perfect body.

The splendor of the opening ceremony and around the
corner the reeking-of-life favelas monitored by
Praetorian Guards with automatic weapons. Keep out
the riff raff, the plenty persons near but not
the hot, the right ones.

The corruption of city-states, the poor, the beggared,
and the rich, the corporate and the incorporate; the
dopers, tokers, and politicians.

The athletes, lithe, lean, and lovely, and the “bulge.”
Ah! The fit-witless and the bulge of youth, the beauty
anyway and incorruptible discipline and dedication
irrelevanced by “commercials.”

And on Copacabana Beach, “We don’t need a stadium
to play volleyball.”

Oh Latin America, Oh Columbus, Columbanumbus!
The New World screwed screwing itself.

The hungry gnaw that eats me night and day…
I need another glass of cachaca and a plate of feijoada.

Tonight I dance with the dancers and drink with the
drinkers. Everyone is my friend even the crooks
on the Olympic Committee.


Bob Katrin is a writer and poet living in Southern Pines, NC.

THE COMING OF COLUMBUS

by John Z. Guzlowski

"The arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas marked the meeting of previously separate biological worlds." --"The Columbian Exchange" by J.R. McNeil, Learn NC (Painting: "Landing of Columbus" by John Vanderlyn, commissioned 1836/1837; placed 1847. Capitol Rotunda, Washington, D.C.)

Everywhere
trees paused
their slow growth
upward and outward
and leaves stopped
unfolding into
the waiting air

In the tallest branches
birds leaned
their crooked beaks
into the wind
and hushed

somewhere a boy stayed
his axe above the log
he was splitting

and waited
for the smallpox
to settle on his face

like a shaman’s
soft and loving
whisper

John Guzlowski’s writing has appeared in The Ontario Review, Atlanta Review, and Exquisite Corpse.  His poems about his parents’ experiences in Nazi concentration camps appear in his book Lightning and Ashes.

COLUMBUS DAY

by Tom Karlson






financed by Iberian Jewry
the Admiral, Christian or Jew, Spaniard or Italian
leads 120 men in the
Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria
sailing south and west 
India bound
crewed by:
Milton Friedman and his Chicago University goons
     in charge of propaganda, interrogation, discipline,
     race and class consciousness 
Prescott Bush and George Armstrong Custer
     compose the voyage manifesto and mission
below deck are the sun-dried souls of
Rasputin, the Popes, Sylvester the Second and Benedict the Ninth
     in charge of rape, incest, and family values
Pinkerton and J Edgar Hoover
     spying,   pimping, and procuring stool pigeons
Kenneth Lay 
     finance, mergers, and loans
Edward Teller  
     munitions
Robert E Lee’s horse Traveler
will show the way home
where Ferdinand and Isabella’s bishops
find Jews to murder and maim, books to burn, Moors to exterminate

Columbus will trade
measles, diphtheria, small pox, and malaria
for gold and land
as he works out the science of genocide on Hispaniola
never forgetting the University’s tools of slavery   colonization
religious fanaticism   and free market capitalism    
           

Tom Karlson is founder of Poets for Peace, Long Island, NY.

FIRST RIGHT OF REFUSAL

by Laura Rodley

Don’t pray for me anymore
say the grey whales
birthing calves
off the Pacific coast.
Don’t pray for me anymore
say the right whales
siphoning plankton and krill
off the Atlantic coast.
Don’t pray for me
squawk the seagulls
pedaling pizza
on the beach in Ocean Park,
their beaks full of crust.
Don’t pray for me
say the dying in their beds,
sheets cool and soft.
Don’t pray for me
mewed the tiny black and white
kitten under the stairwell
at the Econo Lodge in Columbus,
it is not your pieces of chicken
that saved me, nor your water
though I was dying of thirst.
I can make it on my own.


Laura Rodley’s New Verse News poem “Resurrection” has won a Pushcart Prize and appears in The Pushcart Prlze XXXVII: Best of the Small Presses (2013 edition). She was nominated twice before for the Prize as well as for Best of the Net. Her chapbook Rappelling Blue Light, a Mass Book Award nominee,  won honorable mention for the New England Poetry Society Jean Pedrick Award. Her second chapbook Your Left Front Wheel is Coming Loose was also nominated for a Mass Book Award and a L.L.Winship/Penn New England Award. Both were published by Finishing Line Press.  Co-curator of the Collected Poets Series, she teaches creative writing and works as contributing writer and photographer for the Daily Hampshire Gazette.  She edited As You Write It, A Franklin County Anthology, Volume I and Volume II.