CARP

by Alan Walowitz

Source: Great Lakes Fishery Commission

llinois delays project to keep invasive carp out of Great Lakes, cites uncertainty over federal funding.—National Public Radio, February 12, 2025

In response to an executive order from the White House targeting Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, the firm’s chair, Brad Karp, cut a deal with Trump to provide $40 million in free legal support and conduct an audit of the firm’s DEI employment and hiring protocols. —Fast Company, March 30, 2025
 

Tech boggles me more and more as I age.
My birthday and here comes a new computer, 
a gift to myself, since my family said,
too pedestrian a want for a man of my years.
But just as Microsoft hoped, 
I’ve rolled over for the Windows 11 scam—
the same way Brad Karp of Paul, Weiss,
the legal behemoth, rolled over 
for the Orange Menace, 
who took up residence in the head lawyer’s head. 
 
My mother was a proud Karp and I’m proud to be,
though not related to any kind of fortune 
other than a few rolls of wallpaper,
and, like Brad, a tendency to find it tough to sleep-- 
though I don’t call them billing hours. 
On behalf of such fish everywhere, 
I’m distressed to learn 
the damage the carp can do to the Great Lakes, 
or, now I know, the world at large.
 
The moral of the story: don’t read this poem,
or hire a Karp to fight a parking ticket.  
You don’t want to give money or power to a fish 
eating the waters of Illinois alive. 

Alan Walowitz is a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry.  His chapbook Exactly Like Love comes from Osedax Press. The full-length The Story of the Milkman and Other Poems is available from Truth Serum Press. Most recently, from Arroyo Seco Press, is the chapbook In the Muddle of the Night written with poet Betsy Mars. Now available for free download is the collection The Poems of the Air from Red Wolf Editions.

[THIS POEM WILL PROBABLY GET US KILLED]

by Sharmila Voorakkara & Ron Riekki

Planned Parenthood officials on Monday announced plans for a mobile abortion clinic—a 37ft recreational vehicle that will stay in Illinois but travel close to the borders of adjoining states that have banned the procedure since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade earlier this year. —The Guardian, October 4, 2022

                                                               for Alexis McGill Johnson

There has always been a running, either away from

or to.  And sometimes, just the promise of anything other than

where you are is all you need to leave. To live.  This fills me

with worried peace… My friend told me that I need

to practice gratitude, to be thankful for mobile clinics

and mobile apps and even my mobile home—

these places of temporary comfort, where people 

might treat you like a person, can understand you are

a being, human, like them, to help with the need to avoid

suffering, needlessly, and perhaps be understood, 

be under caring hands, especially after the hands

that strangled you, tried to own you, drown you,

breakdown you, in your nightgown, you in front

of your children and the law-and-order and the Bible 

that want to shame you, and then, at the border,

this safety, waiting, at the border, thank God, at the border.

Sharmila Voorakkara received her MFA from the University of Virginia. Her first collection of poems, Fire Wheel, was published by the University of Akron Press.

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (Michigan State University Press).

I GREW UP IN HIGHLAND PARK

by Tricia Knoll

Highland Park IL Fourth of July parade, circa 1965.

Twenty-nine spaces in the US carry this name.

When the news broke, I wondered if it was my home town.

It was. The place I lived for the first twenty years of my life. 

My home town as much as any other. Where I was born

 

more than seventy years ago. I hadn’t wondered how much

or what had changed. Videos brought it home. The store

that was once Chandlers where every year I went 

with my mother to get new pencils, pens, and notebooks

 to go back to school. The shoe store with the Xray

machine. The laundry owned by Chinese Americans 

where the windows always dripped with water. 

Mr. Leeds' jewelry store. Across the street

I bought my prom dress to dance with my first love. 

My first bank account on the corner of Central. 

Learning to drive in town across the railroad tracks.

Our library. Smelling the alewives on Ravinia Beach 

where I learned to swim and loved a sun tan.  

Hearing Louis Armstrong sing "Hello Dolly" 

at the festival. My father’s service

on the school board. The flooded

field where I learned to ice skate. The miles

of roads where I careened around on a bike. 

The day a migrating whooping crane stopped

in our flooded back yard. Long ago. Green

skies over oaks before tornados. 

 

My feet once knew every inch of that parade route.

You never really leave those old home towns. 

The red flags didn’t wave true here. The young man

got his assault rifle in a state and town known

for its tougher-than-most gun laws.

I supposed I wouldn’t know anyone who was there

after all these decades. That wasn’t true.

I knew two people who fled the explosions, one

a man I went to school with who fled with his

grandchildren and one a woman who lived next door

to me as a child. Everyone says it can happen

anywhere. I know that now. 

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet. When media people describe Highland Park's 30,000 residents as a small town, she's aware that in Vermont Highland Park would be Vermont's second largest city. She worried about possible violence in June for friends in Portland, Oregon going to the Pride Parade. Her next collection of poetry One Bent Twig is coming out from Future Cycle Press in early 2023—poems reflecting her love and concern for trees facing climate change. She has written about the red oaks of Highland Park.

HIGHER EDUCATION HELD HOSTAGE

by Emily Jo Scalzo

Chicago State University students and supporters demonstrated in the Loop in early February. Photo source: RICH HEIN/SUN-TIMES via Chicago Reader, March 3, 2016. “Chicago State had said it would run out of money by the end of March as Illinois' public colleges and universities wait for state funding held up by the budget standoff. Chicago State has negotiated with the vendors it owes so that it can make payroll through the end of April. To stretch its finances, the predominantly black Chicago State has already issued notices of potential layoffs to its 900 employees and shortened the spring semester.”  —AP via Peoria Public Radio, March 3, 2016

The parking lot at Chicago State University
overflowed the night before the announcement
of nine hundred staff layoffs, a death knell—
the result of the budget impasse in Springfield.

Bernie Sanders chose this venue to hold a rally,
a state university now decimated by political gridlock,
its demographic comprised largely of minorities—
the latest victim in our sad culture war.

After eight months without state funding,
Spring Break was axed to finish the semester early,
to allow seniors to complete degrees, graduate—
all other students in limbo, the river run dry.

At twelve I haunted the halls of Chicago State University,
playing hooky from my small-town middle school,
attending my first poetry reading outside the president’s office—
surrounded by Ebonics and Spanish, African and Latin art.

There I was embraced in culture and pride in diversity,
political protests, creative endeavors, intellectual encouragement;
this environment, a refuge, determined my future—
soon those halls will be walked only by ghosts.


Emily Jo Scalzo holds an MFA in fiction from California State University-Fresno and is currently an assistant professor teaching research and creative writing at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. Her work has appeared in various magazines including Midwestern Gothic, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Blue Collar Review, Ms. Fit Magazine, Third Wednesday, Melancholy Hyperbole, and Leaves of Ink.

TITUM ARUM

by Joan Colby



  The "corpse flower" at the Chicago Botanic Garden was manually opened Sunday morning after it failed to bloom, but the flower did not emit its trademark odor as expected. —NBC Chicago, August 31, 2015


At the Botanic Garden,
The corpse flower was getting ready
To bloom—a once in a lifetime affair.
Fifteen feet high, its vast hulk bulged
Ready to release the stench
That dung beetles adore,
That maggots desire.
But at the seminal moment
Spike decided it could not
Compete in a state rotten
With the stink of politicians:
Four of the last seven governors
Did time—fraud, bribery,
Racketeering, corruption.
The putrid fly leaves in the book
Of their chicaneries
Overwhelm any official flower.


Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, the new renaissance, Grand Street, Epoch, and Prairie Schooner. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards, Rhino Poetry Award, the new renaissance Award for Poetry, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She was a finalist in the GSU Poetry Contest (2007), Nimrod International Pablo Neruda Prize (2009, 2012), and received honorable mentions in the North American Review's James Hearst Poetry Contest (2008, 2010). She is the editor of Illinois Racing News, and lives on a small horse farm in Northern Illinois. She has published 11 books including The Lonely Hearts Killers and How the Sky Begins to Fall (Spoon River Press), The Atrocity Book (Lynx House Press) and Dead Horses and Selected Poems from FutureCycle Press. Selected Poems received the 2013 FutureCycle Prize.  Properties of Matter was published in spring of 2014 by Aldrich Press (Kelsay Books). Two chapbooks are forthcoming in 2014: Bittersweet (Main Street Rag Press) and Ah Clio (Kattywompus Press). Colby is also an associate editor of Kentucky Review and FutureCycle Press. 

FAIRDALE

by Joan Colby

FAIRDALE, Ill. — At least two tornadoes unleashed incredible destruction through north central Illinois. Two people are dead, and several others are injured. Some people are also unaccounted for. Photo: A lone horse is staying close to what used to be his barn. Owners aren't being allowed back yet. —Sean Lewis @seanlewiswgn via WGNNews, April 10, 2015

The bloodied horse walks in small circles
Where the barn stood with the stall.
Straw, timothy, sweet feed
A bucket of spring water.

From the chopper, he’s observed
In a slow practiced rehearsal
Like a monk at his devotions,
Head bobbing, lame in the forehoof,
Miserably alive.

All that’s left of structure:
Splinters. The body of the mare,
His companion, thrown
Into a nearby field with the
Defeathered chickens. At dusk

The twister plowed a fifty mile
Path like a rogue
Tractor. Huge dark wedge
Of rotating force. Shingles
From the barn’s roof plant a pasture
Thirty miles away. This horse, bewildered
Knows only to stay
In the place that he knows.

All those whose homes are smashed
Pick through the ruins
For the one surviving thing—a photograph,
Quilt, child’s toy—that confirms
The lives they had. The horse
Keeps walking.


Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, the new renaissance, Grand Street, Epoch, and Prairie Schooner. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards, Rhino Poetry Award, the new renaissance Award for Poetry, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She was a finalist in the GSU Poetry Contest (2007), Nimrod International Pablo Neruda Prize (2009, 2012), and received honorable mentions in the North American Review's James Hearst Poetry Contest (2008, 2010). She is the editor of Illinois Racing News, and lives on a small horse farm in Northern Illinois. She has published 11 books including The Lonely Hearts Killers and How the Sky Begins to Fall (Spoon River Press), The Atrocity Book (Lynx House Press) and Dead Horses and Selected Poems from FutureCycle Press. Selected Poems received the 2013 FutureCycle Prize.  Properties of Matter was published in spring of 2014 by Aldrich Press (Kelsay Books). Two chapbooks are forthcoming in 2014: Bittersweet (Main Street Rag Press) and Ah Clio (Kattywompus Press). Colby is also an associate editor of Kentucky Review and FutureCycle Press.