SIX FEET

Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California's Central Valley and co-edits One Sentence Poems. Her chapbooks Various Lies, Lion Hunt, and Water Weight are available from Finishing Line Press, Plan B Press, and Right Hand Pointing respectively.

FEAR ITSELF

Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California's Central Valley and co-edits One Sentence Poems. Her chapbooks Various Lies, Lion Hunt, and Water Weight are available from Finishing Line Press, Plan B Press, and Right Hand Pointing respectively.

IRAN CRISIS

Background art: Two Devils ...:  a lithograph by B. Williams, c. 1833

Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California's Central Valley and co-edits One Sentence Poems. Her chapbooks, Various Lies, Lion Hunt, and Water Weight are available from Finishing Line Press, Plan B Press, and Right Hand Pointing, respectively.

FOR DYLAN MCKAY

by Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

Luke Perry, who became a household name playing Dylan McKay in the 1990s TV series Beverly Hills 90210 suffered a stroke and died on March 4.

how many girls
are writing sad poems
for dylan

as we speak maybe

not girls
maybe just

women
who have eye cream
and hard jobs

i was a brenda but
you broke my heart with kelly

and i cried
in my old cutoffs
on the couch in our old house

and i forgot
until just now

what we had meant

when we were young
when we were going to change
the world

but now
i drop my kid at school
i see my face
slipping away in the rear window

and i think
of surfer boys

who would have loved all us cold girls
in the right way

if they were real

if we had let them
if the things we were

were ever
good enough

Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California's Central Valley, and co-edits One Sentence Poems. Her chapbooks, Various Lies, Lion Hunt, and Water Weight are available from Finishing Line Press, Plan B Press, and Right Hand Pointing (for free!) respectively.

RED HAT

by Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco


On our way north,
red brake lights
slam like doors.

We see debris
before we see anything
else:

a half-rolled license
plate, glass stars
ground into dirt.

The car is smashed
in on itself—rain
streaks along each

shattered window. A man
bends

down with his hands flat
on his thighs

to see inside,
his shoulders

tight. Someone has put out
flares.

The thing I can’t
believe

is the man’s MAGA
hat, clean like it is new,
holding the rain up

off his face.
I have to read it twice
to get it’s not

a joke, and then
it aches

and I’m ashamed,
the afterimage of the hat

and the wrecked car

drifting with me
all day long
like floating leaves.

Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California and co-edits One Sentence Poems. Her chapbooks Various Lies and Lion Hunt are available from Finishing Line Press and forthcoming from Plan B Press, respectively.

THINKING ABOUT MARILOU

by Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco



Of all
people I

should be more
sympathetic, should

be kinder to
The Woman Who Loved
Wrong—after

all, I have
been her,

sitting next
to a dark window

on the plane,
with the shadow

of the plane
lost in the ocean

with the person

I loved
lost

to all kindness. But
I can’t


get past her picture (not

her fault), how she

is smiling
and a fingertip of white hair

on her forehead (not
her fault)

shows she didn’t touch
the color up

and blue is all
around her like a
halo, and she’s

happy, and I

hate her
hate her
hate her

because, then,
she didn’t know

because
she wanted
to be loved

because it’s too hard
after all
to be so

sad.

Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California's Central Valley, and co-edits One Sentence Poems. Her chapbook Various Lies is available from Finishing Line Press.

HAIKU

by Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

Image source: Flickr

yesterday

small holes somebody shot

into the stop sign

Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California's Central Valley. Her chapbook Various Lies is available from Finishing Line Press.

LOBSTERS

by Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

Three people have died in a series of shootings at three sites near Hesston, Kansas, including a lawn care products factory, authorities said Thursday night. Photo: Fernando Salazar, AP via USA Today, Feb. 25, 2016

When the dogs attack
your dog,

in the new park, you spend the whole time

wondering
if you are wrong, if somehow you

misunderstood.
The light is beautiful
that night:

a hollowed shell.
No one thinks of how the thing

that lives inside
gets boiled alive.

Buried.
Frozen. There
are manuals, online.

You start
shaking

when you see how the dogs’ mouths
are full of blood, you

started screaming
at some point, oh,
no, my god, although you don’t
believe in gods.

Thursday night, another man
shot everyone

like it was in
another language where this thing
just sometimes happens.

People tried
to explain:

the soft
warm evening, what he ate, the curling

screams
like lobsters boiling,

bumping dully
in the pot.


Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California's Central Valley, where she works as a librarian. Her chapbook Various Lies is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

FALSE FLAG

by Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco


     
"Even among right-wing radio hosts, Alex Jones is a standout. Where Rush Limbaugh offers a torrent of conservative views that largely align with Republican policy preferences, Jones labels 9/11 an 'inside job.' Where Mark Levin touts radical constitutional theories that, nonetheless, have grown popular in Republican circles, Jones ties same-sex marriage on 'the eugenicist/globalist view.' Jones is the king of fringe conspiracy theories. Among other things, he may be the nation’s most prominent proponent of the view that the Sandy Hook shooting that killed 26 people an elementary school was a 'synthetic, completely fake — with actors, in my view — manufactured' hoax. And one hour before another terrible mass shooting occurred in San Bernardino, California on Wednesday, Jones hosted a very special guest on his radio show — Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump. 
     "Alex Jones' website, Infowars, already has an article suggesting the San Bernardino shooting was a false flag operation: https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/672235629577682944." --ThinkProgress.org



The night of,
we go out
to look at Christmas lights. There:
snow
made of white flashes
on a  lawn; a bony
reindeer.

Pale fog drifts in sweaty
heaps
across the windshield.

On the radio,
a man says
the attacks

are a false flag,
that he will not allow himself
to be

oppressed.

Does this make sense?

Down the street,
flashing blue lights
surround a door.

Jesus looks up
from a manger
on a roof

at distant stars.


Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California's Central Valley. Her work has appeared in TheNewVerse.News, The Potomac Review, Paper Nautilus, The Tule Review, and the Kentucky Review, among others.

RADICALIZED

Editor's Note: We are pleased to repost this poem, originally published in TheNewVerse.News on Sunday, March 8, 2015. It is one of our 2015 Pushcart Prize nominees.

RADICALIZED
by Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

Image source: RCOG Globeal Network International Women’s Day Page

The main thing was, she
listened. A
cliché.

So we told her
everything: how we cared

how we couldn’t
stand

watching all the news, how sad we felt.

She said we’re right. We told her
more: little

slips like pretty dolls
with long loose hair

laid on their backs –

here: the teacher
who won’t look
at us

my mother’s glass of brandy
every night,
her soft red cheeks.

She said the answer and it was
the one we wanted.

On the big plane
looking down
at the dark world we held

our coats wrapped tight
as love

around our ribs. The future waited like a bear,
still asleep.


Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California's Central Valley, where she works as a librarian. Her poems have appeared in Word Riot, Hobart, decomP, The Tule Review, and Right Hand Pointing, among others.

OIL SPILL

by Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

Last Tuesday, an onshore pipeline belonging to the Texas-based oil company Plains All American burst, spewing roughly 105,000 gallons of crude down a storm drain and into an undeveloped stretch of coastline just north of Santa Barbara. Roughly a fifth of that oil made its way into open water. It may be the worst oil disaster the California coast has seen since a devastating 1969 spill in the very same region sparked a national wave of environmental legislation. This photo provided by the Santa Barbara County Fire Department shows an oil slick from the broken pipeline near Santa Barbara on Tuesday, May 19, 2015. Photo credit: Mike Eliason/Santa Barbara County Fire Department via AP —Gizmodo, May 24, 2015

The water
paints the shoreline
black.

No.

We did this to ourselves.


Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California's Central Valley. Her poetry has appeared in The New Verse News, The Kentucky Review, Paper Nautilus, The Tule Review, Right Hand Pointing and The Lake, among others.

THE PUPS

by Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

Wildlife services in California are being pushed to their limits this year. Since January 2015, every month has set a record in sea lion "strandings," mostly sea lion pups, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "There has been an unusually high number of sea lions stranded since January," said Justin Greenman, assistant stranding coordinator for NOAA on the West Coast. "Stranding does happen, but just to give you perspective, 1,800 [sea lion] pups have been responded to this year alone. We responded to 1,600 strandings total during the entire year in 2013," he said. Stranding is the official term to describe marine life that "swim or float into shore and become beached or stuck," according to NOAA. Greenman said California has had warmer weather than usual this year, and, while NOAA is still conducting studies on the Channel Islands to get a more proven explanation, warmer water drives the food source farther out or deeper into the ocean, where the colder water is. When food is farther away, the mothers are away from the pup too long in search of food, and return with little food or too few nutrients for a growing sea lion. —CNN, March 18, 2015

The pups
rise like shaking hands
out of the surf,

with their skin
held like bunched blankets
round their shoulders. They aren’t
yours.

Who should claim them?

From the road, they are the color of the sand –
easy to miss. Think

of them:
their wide steep eyes,
and their bones like broken sticks.


Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California. Her poetry has appeared in The New Verse News, Word Riot, The Kentucky Review, Paper Nautilus, The Lake, and The Tule Review, among others.

RADICALIZED

by Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

Image source: RCOG Globeal Network International Women’s Day Page

The main thing was, she
listened. A
cliché.

So we told her
everything: how we cared

how we couldn’t
stand

watching all the news, how sad we felt.

She said we’re right. We told her
more: little

slips like pretty dolls
with long loose hair

laid on their backs –

here: the teacher
who won’t look
at us

my mother’s glass of brandy
every night,
her soft red cheeks.

She said the answer and it was
the one we wanted.

On the big plane
looking down
at the dark world we held

our coats wrapped tight
as love

around our ribs. The future waited like a bear,
still asleep.


Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California's Central Valley, where she works as a librarian. Her poems have appeared in Word Riot, Hobart, decomP, The Tule Review, and Right Hand Pointing, among others.