BIDEN’S AGE

by Paul Hostovsky

Of course it’s a concern.

I, for one, would like to hear him talk about it

more candidly, 

the constipation, for example, 

and whether he uses Benefiber or Metamucil

or Miralax, or is that a state 

secret? I’d like to know how long 

on average he sits on the john

before there’s any movement 

on the southern front, 

and whether he writes any speeches 

in that attitude, that pose like Rodin’s Penseur 

sur la toilette. Because I myself

have sat on the john for an eternity 

without making any headway

but I get some of my best ideas there,

this one, for example, about Biden’s age

and my desire as a Democrat

for my president to be more forthcoming

about the daily indignities of the old, 

such as constipation, an indignity it isn’t dignified

or presidential to talk about in public perhaps,

but if he did talk about it he’d get my vote,

and possibly the votes of more than a few

Republicans. Because look at Trump–

I mean the guy is full of shit 

but he won’t admit it. I think if Biden 

admitted it, he’d have a good chance 

of winning the race 

and maybe get the runs

which would really turn things around.

Paul Hostovsky's poems have won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, and have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer's Almanac, and the Best American Poetry blog.

AFTER THE PRESIDENT SPOKE ON DEMOCRACY

by Indran Amirthanayagam

 

The day is coming, and nobody

is turning away. It is coming like

sun rising, like rain about to burst

 

from cloud, and no matter

where you stand on this earth

you will feel the thunder clap,

 

the roar of the volcano

blowing its top, and you will 

be amazed and chastened,

 

and you will hug love beside

you, love in dreams, love

in history. These are end 

 

times, to take stock, 

to remember, to say

thank you, to wash away

 

the fog of amnesia. Clarity.

Piercing. Truth telling, 

standing with families of 

 

the disappeared everywhere. 

These are times of forgiveness, 

of searing light despite 

 

forces of ruin, of sore 

losing, of twisting laws,

of dictatorship. These 

 

are times for the new 

civil contract, not 

guns but mind, 

 

not mockery 

but respect, not 

cult but democrat.

Indran Amirthanayagam's newest book is Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks). Recently published is Blue Window (Ventana Azul), translated by Jennifer Rathbun.(Dialogos Books). In 2020, Indran produced a “world" record by publishing three new poetry books written in three languages: The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, New York), Sur l'île nostalgique (L’Harmattan, Paris) and Lírica a tiempo (Mesa Redonda, Lima). He writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Haitian Creole and has twenty poetry books as well as a music album Rankont Dout. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He won the Paterson Prize and received fellowships from The Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, US/Mexico Fund For Culture, and the MacDowell Colony. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

THE MAKING OF A DEMOCRAT

by Gil Hoy

A young boy 

was still growing. 

Still learning 

whether he’d be happy

or he’d be sad. 

 

Early one morning,

his mother was slowly 

backing the family car 

out of the driveway. 

 

She began chanting:

“I love life, 

I love people,

I love the earth.”

 

While tapping her foot

and gently honking 

the car horn.

Gil Hoy is a Boston poet, nominated for a Best of the Net award in 2020, who studied poetry at Boston University through its Evergreen program. Hoy's poetry has previously appeared in The New Verse News, Best Poetry Online, Muddy River Poetry Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, Rusty Truck, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, The Penmen Review, Misfit Magazine, Rat’s Ass Review, Chiron Review, and elsewhere. Hoy previously received a B.A. in Philosophy and Political Science from Boston University, an M.A. in Government from Georgetown University, and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. He served as a Brookline, Massachusetts Selectman for four terms and is a semi-retired personal injury lawyer.

INFIRMITY

by Rick Mullin

After the Mueller Report by Barry Blitt at The New Yorker

The faithless Democrat turns very fast
on a purported savior when that savior
doesn’t let him have his way. The last
two days bring out his worst behavior.
Now the hope of a purported dossier
is dashed, the clumsy meeting in the tower
proves another harrowing non-starter.
The Democrat hangs back at happy hour,
pining for the days of Jimmy Carter
before the Gipper took his ball away.
“Perhaps that special counsel was a ruse!”
He’ll air that out on social media.
His reverence for a savior’s fast and loose,
unlike that of the MAGA ascaridia
whose savior lives to loathe another day.


Rick Mullin's newest poetry collection is Lullaby and Wheel.

TRUMPLAND

by Brad Whitehurst

Driggs, Idaho

The yurt’s tent-flap unzipped, three Newfie hounds
ecstatic in their freedom jostle past,
sloshing John’s morning mug. They gain the trees,
inspect interstices in rock and root,
cavort through creek beds, drop fresh pats. Half-blinded
by the stroke, John navigates by sound
as his good eye makes out the blur of firs
dividing meadow from the woods. He follows
in Crocs and bathrobe, clods that mine the path
be damned, and makes a beeline for the clearing:
trampled earth, trailed twigs, fine tumbleweeds
of dog hair, Adirondack chair, and stump
cum coffee table. A sign nailed to a tree
reads Aggie’s Place. Ensconced, he senses the Tetons’
rising alpenglow; spies breeze-whipped, flip-
flopped coins of aspens, gold and copper; cocks
an ear for flocks invading the willows. Here
is retirement: three dogs, two homes, one wife,
dear Linda, preservationist of wildness
in daily life.

                      The etiquette of freedom,
Gary Snyder wrote, is how to live
with nature ordering impermanence:
improve the campsite, teach the children, oust
the tyrants. Done at last with all the awful
blather of alternative facts that stick
in the gorge and choke, we might, like Snyder, take
the longer view, unplug devices, and hike
till ego is fatigued and hubris humbled
by the parks. Take John, for instance, the only
Democrat in Idaho (save Linda
and the folks from the conservancy),
who makes his halting way each day to this edge
of wilderness. In geologic time,
these stratigraphic eras of rock uplifted,
scattered like pages of ancient manuscript,
expose rare Paleozoic fossil beds
with palimpsests of species long extinct.
Other lines have metamorphosed through their offspring
across the eons, only to decline
in genetic cul-de-sacs. In this pathetic
fallacy, a landscape that devolves
at a glacial pace, indifferent to regimes
outlasted, lacks the human element,
this mortal urge to act. Some men make idols
of themselves, which others worship, scorn,
ignore. And some like John get moving, refusing
to hunker in a man cave of self-pity,
lamenting democracy. He’d rather run
the dogs unleashed and trust in a blind man’s timing.

His coffee cooled, he listens to the pack,
bur-snagged and tuckered, amble up as Aggie,
the eldest in the back, stiffens, sniffs,
turns gyroscopic, howling at the scent
of dinosaur descendants in retreat
or coming home to roost. Three sandhill cranes
raise another prehistoric ruckus
—staccato trumpet bleats to tease the seers—
and, rising, wing past John’s appointed seat.

A native of Richmond, Virginia, Brad Whitehurst lives in New York City and teaches at the Nightingale-Bamford School.  He has earned degrees in English from The College of William and Mary (BA), Georgetown University (MA), and the Bread Loaf School of English (MLitt).  His poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Meridian, Sewanee Theological Review, voidmagazine.com, Iambs and Trochees, Country Dog Review, The Episcopal New Yorker, waywiserpress.com, among other venues.

THE VICTRESS

by James Reiss   

Hillary Clinton by DonkeyHotey

    From Ronald
    to Donald
    politics
    sticks
    to people
    who sweep all                              
away with their tricks.

     The voters
     gun toters
     scope out Reeps
     not Bo-Peeps
     while the Dems
     with ahems                      
eye Al Gore–like veeps.

     But the winner
     a grinner
     more clever
     than ever
     won’t say Trump
     on the stump                                                        
is a dirtbag—never.

     As our prez
     she says  
     she’ll drink in                              
     Abe Lincoln
     standing straight
     while we state                  
Here’s to Hillary Clinton!

Spuyten Duyvil will release James Reiss’s debut novel, When Yellow Leaves, in September, and it will publish his second novel, Façade for a Penny Arcade, in 2017. He is the author of six full-length poetry books, including The Breathers, Ten Thousand Good Mornings, and Riff on Six: New and Selected Poems. His work has appeared in such places as The Atlantic, Esquire, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Poetry, Slate, and Virginia Quarterly Review. As Professor Emeritus of English at Miami University, he is Founding Editor of Miami University Press in Oxford, Ohio. His surname rhymes with “peace.”