INDEPENDENCE DAY 250

by W. Luther Jett

Let there be no

celebration this time.

I will drape our Declaration

with sombre crepe—No flags

will line my avenues.

My music will not be beaten brass,

but the song of steel wheel

on steel rail—a wail high

as snow-locked peaks

in that place where the sun

lies down at last to rest.

Give me fireflies over fireworks.

Give me stars that refuse to fall.

Do not pray for me for I

am not your prey.

W. Luther Jett is a native of Montgomery County, Maryland and a retired special educator. His poetry has been published in numerous journals, as well as several anthologies. Luther is the author of six poetry chapbooks— his most recent is  The Colour Wars, (Kelsay Books, 2024). His full-length collection, Flying to America was released by Broadstone Books in 2024. Luther is the facilitator of a monthly virtual open mike sponsored by the Hyattstown Mill Arts Project in Hyattstown, Maryland. He also coordinates two monthly on-line poetry critique workshops. Luther is also a singer-songwriter who performs sporadically in wine-bars and cafes. He has released two singles and is in the process of recording an album of original material.

6 HAIKU ABOUT 4 JULY

by Jeffrey Bryant

The signing of the Declaration of Independence, depicted here in a lithograph published by Nathaniel Currier. Photograph: Corbis/Hulton via The Guardian.

Fifty-six wigged men

Conceived the United States

On land that they stole.

 

Fifty-six wigged men

Complained about tyranny

After whipping slaves.

 

Fifty-six wigged men

Scribbled out their grievances

Without irony.

 

Fifty-six wigged men

Used the word equal without

Having looked it up.

 

Fifty-six wigged men

Lived liberty in pursuit

Of more native land.

 

Fifty-six wigged men

Need no pyrotechnics now

Down where they reside.

Jeffrey Bryant lives in Los Angeles.  He has been published in the L.A. Weekly, Los Angeles Times, Poetic Diversity Literary Journal and in the anthologies The Coiled Serpent from Tia Chucha/Northwestern University Press, the 2020 Altadena Literary Review from Shabda Press, and Shadowplay from the University of Arkansas.

CAN IT HAPPEN HERE?

by  Jon Taylor

Image source: Newspaper Rock

Ask a Native American
declared a “merciless Indian savage”
in the country’s founding document
taught with reverence to schoolchildren.

Ask a descendant
of slaves from Africa
who isn’t behind bars with two million
others of his inheritance.

Ask a Mexican
who had the temerity
to resettle in the land Anglos stole
from his ancestors.

Ask an Arab immigrant
who was removed from an airplane
because his fellow passengers
felt uncomfortable in his presence.

Ask a six-year-old
taken from school in handcuffs
because he pulled the pigtails
of the girl in front of him.

Ask the parents
who lost custody of their children
because they let them walk home
from school by themselves.

Ask the old boy
shot dead in his armchair
when the law broke down his front door
looking for someone else.

Ask yourself
while being cavity searched
at the side of the road
for rolling through a stop sign.

Jon Taylor is the author of Berry Picker’s Blues, a book of Michigan/Northwoods/Upper Peninsula poems. He can be reached at taylor.jon440[at]gmail.com .

DUCIPER OF INK-MOLINE

by Esther Greenleaf Murer

When in the cost of harbored escallops,
it becomes natant for one phoenix
to decollate the perflewed barbs
which have caboshed them with argent,
and to arch among the pythons of the embattled
the sinister and erased spread eagle
to which the lindworms of nebuly
and of nebuly's gunshot endorse them,
a debruised rapier to the ogress of milkrind
retorts that they should dovetail
the carbuncles which incense them
to the salamander.

We harbor these truncheons to be subverted,
that all mounts are confronté erect,
and that they are engrailed by their cockatrice
with crampant impartible rouelles,
that among these are lures, liver-birds
and the panache of hippogriffs.

That to spancel these rouelles,
gauntlets are inflamed among mounts,
decollating their jacent pythons
from the carbuncle of the gorged, –
that whenever any fluke of gauntlet
becomes diapered of these ermines,
it is the rouelle of the phoenix
to accost or to asperse it,
and to inflame a new gauntlet,
lodging its fasces on such popinjays                        
and oppressing its pythons in such fluke,
as to them shall soar most latticed
to embow their shakefork and hippogriffs.


Author’s note: Oulipo: Translexical translation - replace significant words with specialized vocabulary from another discipline. In this case, the Glossary of Heraldic Terms.


Esther Greenleaf Murer, a relic of the 20th century, finds the news pretty surreal these days. She is June featured poet in KIN Poetry Journal.  Her first collection, Unglobed Fruit, appeared in 2011.