DROP THE MIC

by Steven Kent

 

 

 

"U.S. defense spending would rise $445B under Trump budget plan, with steep cuts elsewhere." —The Guardian, April 3, 2026

A budget written by a nutter
Favors guns instead of butter.
Starve the people, stoke the power?
No, said Mr. Eisenhower.

 

 

Steven Kent is the poetic alter ego of writer and musician Kent Burnside. His work appears in 251, Asses of Parnassus, The Dirigible Balloon, Light, Lighten Up Online, The Lyric, New Verse News, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Philosophy Now, The Pierian, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, The Road Not Taken: A Journal of Formal Poetry, Snakeskin, and Well Read. His collections I Tried (And Other Poems, Too) (2023) and Home at Last (2025) are published by Kelsay Books. 

THE HIGH SCHOOL BAND AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN

by Martha Deed

1 The Students

Tonight!
Gigantic Rally
at Madison Square Garden 

Our high school band
invited to play

Admission Free

We will march up Eighth Ave
in a ticker tape parade

President Eisenhower in person!

We will play “Hail to the Chief”
for real

Was I playing clarinet that year?

We will play in Madison Square Garden
as sure as 
as sure as the Knicks
to entertain the crowd

Or was I playing glockenspiel?

2 The School Authorities and the Parents

We’ll let them go
even with the usual field trip worries
the bus could break down
a chaperon on the sauce
a kid throws up on the bus
or starts a fight

We shall vigorously lead the way
to a review and revision
of our immigration laws

after overcoming the fear of partisanship
we will not worry about the bomb threat
phoned to the New York Daily News
an hour before the rally began
because we won’t know about it

Four years ago
we wandered wearily
in the darkness
of a drifting war

because there is no internet to scare us bloodless
yet

we wondered how long a government
could effectively lead the free world
when it no longer commanded
the pride of its own people

We have welcomed an effective attack on inflation

Even as he speaks 

I have seen the face of our land
soil, rivers and forests
their richness and power conserved

and promises

to serve our national interest
to promote understanding in the world
to give new validity
to America’s role of leadership
in this world

they won’t remember anything he said.

3 Two days later

The letter from The White House
The letter copied for each band member
The words forgotten
The letter kept

Martha Deed’s third poetry collection Haunted By Martha was released by FootHills Publishing, July 2023. She has published ten books (poetry, mixed media, non-fiction) and ten chapbooks along with inclusion in more than 20 poetry anthologies. Individual poems have appeared in The New Verse News, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Earth’s Daughters, First Literary Review—East, Shampoo, Gypsy, and many others.

EARLY VOTING

by Martha Deed

When the six year-olds in Miss Rumsey's first grade class elected Truman
one girl was practically the only one voting for Dewey.  She was embarrassed
and outcast. Her parents could not be convinced to change their minds
and she grew suspicious of polls.  Her place in life improved only slightly
in '52 when everyone agreed on Eisenhower and in '56 she won a quarter
from her Presbyterian father when the General defeated Adlai Stevenson
despite her father's prediction Ike would die before Election Day.  He fortified
his flawed opinion with a coin. And so it goes. Each election more savage
than the last. Each more desperate.
Probably Goldwater wouldn't have dropped the bomb. 

But now the grown-up child knows what desperation really means
when you have to vote with Gunslingers who think Others are Crooks
and Scoundrels and maybe Immigrants or Black, Have No Souls,
and Want To Eat Babies. When she voted today (early voting to avoid the rush),
no one stood outside armed-to-the-teeth. The election workers looked
like librarians. They were soft-spoken and gave clear instructions
like her second grade teacher Miss White who taught her pupils
how to tie their shoes and zip up their snowsuits so she wouldn't
have to do it herself. The election workers are not allowed to do it themselves.
They say The ballots have two sides. Color your choices inside the lines.

Martha Deed's poetry has appeared in The New Verse News and most recently or forthcoming in Moss Trill, Mason Street, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Grand Little Things, The Skinny Poetry Journal. Her poetry collections Under the Rock (2019) and Climate Change (2014) and a third collection forthcoming from FootHills Publishing. She is a retired psychologist who makes trouble with poetry inspired by crises and other mishaps around her house on the Erie Canal in Western New York.

IF AMERICA FOUGHT WORLD WAR II LIKE COVID-19

by Jon Wesick

More people in the United States have died this year from Covid-19 than were killed in four years of fighting on the battlefields during World War II, according to the latest NBC News data. —NBC News, December 11, 2020

The President calls it Fake News

and urges Americans to buy Japanese.

As hundreds of thousands die

in Guadalcanal and Normandy, the public

adopts swastikas and Hitler salutes

in disdain for the “liberal media.”

 

No scrap drives, no Rosie the Riveter, just Emperor Hirohito

on the cover of Life Magazine. Gilligan and the Skipper

shadow convoys across the Atlantic

and radio their positions to lurking U boats.

Calling him an “Antifa terrorist,” Gomer Pyle  

mails Audie Murphy death threats. Barney Fife

kidnaps General Eisenhower and tries him for treason.

 

A lot of people, really important people,

say this is a terrific generation, maybe the most terrific

of all. Terrific is better than greatest, okay.

It’s huge. Better than the generation that freed

the slaves, too. Bunch of losers, so sad. 

Why terrific? Winning. It’s true.

So much winning

 

Jon Wesick is a regional editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual. He’s published hundreds of poems and stories in journals such as the Atlanta Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Metal Scratches, The New Verse News, Pearl, Slipstream, Space and Time, Tales of the Talisman, and Zahir. The editors of Knot Magazine nominated his stories “The Visitor” and “A Story for the Rest of Us” for Pushcart Prizes. His poem “Meditation Instruction” won the Editor’s Choice Award in the 2016 Spirit First Contest. Another poem “Bread and Circuses” won second place in the 2007 African American Writers and Artists Contest. “Richard Feynman’s Commute” shared third place in the 2017 Rhysling Award’s short poem category. Jon is the author of the poetry collections Words of Power, Dances of Freedom and A Foreigner Wherever I Go as well as several novels and short story collections. His most recent novel is The Enigma Brokers.

THE ELDERS

by Michael Cantor

The city bosses and their smoke filled rooms
gave us Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower;
and once you get beyond cigars and booze,

the smell of Scotch and misbegotten power,
there’s still the knowledge that those drunken fools
picked out Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower.

But now we’ve fixed the system, passed new rules—
the people choose their leaders, not some hacks—
and all acknowledge that those party tools

were mostly focused on each other’s backs.
Today, the public’s voice is clear and loud—
the people choose their leaders, and the hacks

just keep the score; and we can all be proud
that this is how democracy will flower.
Indeed, the public’s voice is clear and loud:

the rule of law has fundamental power.
But every night that inner tune resumes:
The city bosses and their smoke filled rooms
gave us Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower.

Michael Cantor’s first full-length collection Life in the Second Circle (Able Muse Press, 2012) was a finalist for the Able Muse Prize and 2013 Massachusetts Book Award for Poetry. A chapbook The Performer was published in 2007. His work has appeared in The Dark Horse, Measure, Raintown Review, frogpond, New Walk, Think, Light, and numerous other journals and anthologies.

NO EYE FOR AN EYE

by Judith Terzi

Above: David Greenglass, with his sister, Ethel Rosenberg. (Image source: NY Times.) Known as "the spy that turned his family in," Greenglass died in July 2014. His death was only recently announced.

For he was ninety-two and she dead 

at thirty-seven     five

shocks before sundown to put her 

out at Sing Sing

No remorse from this man who 

stole his sister's breath 

to save his wife's     his kids'     Did he 

ever imagine that currents 

would flow through his own flesh 

and blood     smoke 

rushing from his sister's head

like a geyser?     Five jolts 

before the Jewish sabbath began     

For he was free before his fifteen years 

were up     For he was free 

to change his name     like Ethel's children 

had to     And all the while     

Ike     lounging in August fragrance     

on a balcony of air     under 

the dome of a red umbrella   its spokes 

taut as the narrowing of mind

Judith Terzi is the author of Sharing Tabouli and Ghazal for a Chambermaid (Finishing Line). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in BorderSenses, The Raintown Review, Times They Were A-Changing: Women Remember the 60s & 70s (She Writes), TRIVIA: Voices of Feminism, Wide Awake: The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond (Beyond Baroque), and elsewhere. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and Web.

1955

by Philip C. Kolin
 
 

Emmett Till
(July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955)

A year of fantasies, allowed sorcery--
Disneyland opens in Anaheim

Throngs flock to inhabit inflatable kingdoms
America thrives in this the year of the rat

The Mickey Mouse Club enrolls millions;
ears big as Eisenhower's listen but

School children killed by a freight train
in Spring City, TN could not hear the whistle.

Elvis makes his first appearance, half
of him seen on Ed Sullivan, the other

Half below the blackened screen
girls riot at his concert in Jacksonville

Thrown into menarche--
"Bye, bye, babies," sings the King.

Mourners queue around James Dean
tears for a rebel hero whose monument

Is air conditioned. Theatres feature
animated dogs and travelogues.

Gunsmoke premieres and so does
the Viet Nam War staring Ho Chi Minh.

Race becomes a sidebar topic
little Claudette Colvin refuses

To give up her seat on a Montgomery
bus; she is cuffed and carried off backwards.

Segregation is outlawed on trains
and Greyhounds traveling interstate

Routes end with clubs and thugs
stamping black faces with welts.

Eisenhower suffers a coronary
thrombosis. McDonald's opens

Its first golden arches
GM makes a billion in profits.

On Emmett Till's murder day
millions tune in

Sudden death
football--Rams defeat the Giants.

Later, Emmett waits for resurrection in the Tallahatchie
America puts In God We Trust on money.


Philip C. Kolin, University Distinguished Professor in the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Southern Mississippi, is the editor of The Southern Quarterly and has published more than 30 scholarly books on African American playwrights, Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee. Also a poet, Kolin has published five books of poems, the most recent being Reading God's Handwriting: Poems (Kaufmann, 2012), as well as hundreds of poems in such journals as the Michigan Quarterly Review, Louisiana Literature, South Carolina Review, Christian Century, Spiritus, Seminary Ridge Review, America, and has co-edited Hurricane Blues: Poems about Katrina and Rita (Southwest Missouri UP, 2006) with Susan Swartwout.