LIZZO

by Judy Juanita

I am 100% behind you baby girl

Behind your superb black ass

Behind your exponential black ass

Behind all the big black women

We who are BeyBey

We who are BeyBey's kids

We who raised BeyBey

Who raised BeyBey's babies and babydaddies

We behind you Lizzo

Show that ass

Put that ass on the Lakers scoreboard

For the world to see

Your big fat cocoa ass

As important for the world to see as 

Emmett Till's bludgeoned face

"Let them see what they did to my boy

Let the world see what they did to my boy"

Let us worship Lizzo

That's right—Bow down

Before her big black ass 

Before her big black booty

Not injected into her backside by a Dominican doctor

Not leaking formaldehyde into her veins clotting her heart

Killing one more big fat implacable life

Fuck Brazilian butt lifts

Fuck the strip clubs that hire the women

Who pay with their very life for butts

That sit high on their hips

21st century Venus Hottentots

Fuck the only way these women will earn $2,000 a night $3,000 a night $4,000 a night

Instead of working at  Walmart

(Yeah yeah yeah do the math $15@ hr. times 30 hrs a week so they don't have to give them health benefits. That's $450 a week, $1800 a month, the living wage that Biden is fighting for? Get real. You'd hop on a plane to the Dominican Republic, leak silicone all over the seats armrests tray tables too for a big black ass a big black ass)

Lizzo's black ass is worth gold

Diamonds and Gucci

In the belly of the beast 

Same place where

Lizzo's Army yeah

A black only army for the descendants of Buffalo Soldiers and Tuskegee Airmen 

A big black beautiful army whose big black unbleached asshole emits the noxious gases called life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Same place where corner stores have filled those asses for decades with hostess twinkies butterfingers koolaid fruit loops sodas hogmaw and chitlins hot links potato salad macaroni and cheese sweet potato pie (BeyBey's son the athlete/personal trainer says with disgust, Ma, this is carbo overload, but eats at the christmas table because he too worships Lizzo once a year)

We love you Lizzo

Our anti-Lady Godiva

Our anti-Kardashian

Our anti-American

Miss America?

You're the missing America

The antidote to self-loathing

You had to be huge

In our face

All over the place

You are the dream deferred no more

You cannot be invisible

You will not live underground

Not one more day

Lizzo our Lizzo

Lizzo Lizzo Lizzo Lizzo Lizzo

You is You is You is

America the beautiful.

Judy Juanita's book of poetry Manhattan my ass, you're in Oakland won the 2021 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Her short story collection The High Price of Freeways won the Tartt Fiction Award and will be published by the University of West Alabama's Livingston Press in 2022. Het debut novel Virgin Soul was published by Viking in 2014. 

OLD GUY AWAITS VACCINE

by Earl J. Wilcox

 "Time waits for no man,” watercolor by SuayaArt.

So far I have outlived whooping cough, measles, mumps, shingles,

strokes, dementia, the Apocalypse, the Rapture, three years eleven

months of the T***P madness, perhaps one Kardashian, zombie

uprisings, my dear mate of six decades, three siblings, one child, eviction,

twenty-four Marvel Universe movies, hundreds of episodes of Friends

and Big Bang Theory, dear Alex Trebek, bankruptcy, cancer, plus

millions of maladies and diseases about which I am totally ignorant.

If I live another few days or weeks, perhaps the vaccine will find me

and my generation still optimistic we can add Covid-19 to the lists

of days and hours of this world we miss.

Earl Wilcox in his late 80s awaits the vaccine in South Carolina.

ANYONE CAN BE SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE

by Edmund Conti 

Greetings, friends, each single seeker
Of that position known as Speaker.
If you can read this, then you’re able.
Just leave your street cred on the table.
Said credentials being this—
You’re a person, hit or miss.
Male, female, or a tran
(frankly we’d prefer a man).
A technocrat, a horse’s rump,
We’ll even take you, Donald Trump.
We’d much prefer your lovely spouse
Or Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse.
You can be the Prez, no lie.
Succeed yourself if you should die.
A man of quality and fashion
Or, failing that, just any Kardashian.
The spot is open, come and get it
Even though you will regret it.
Enjoy your moment in the sun
Working on stuff that won’t get done.


When Edmund Conti speaks no one listens. That's why he writes.

BEING AM-ISH IN AN OLYMPIAD WORLD

by Krista Genevieve Farris

Image source: LGBTAmish.com

I got a call sometime last summer. He was shunned.
I wasn't allowed to cry, the conversation was never about me
but of his death and her muncha muncha on his segmented life,
the unfurling of her wings and a fighting not to be cliché butterfly fragile flight.

I consumed our youth, chewed on Polaroid bits,
tried to digest as I kicked the covers. Didn't say-
it hurt to swallow jigsawed shots  
it slashed each time I couldn't utter his name.

I gurgled I love you with a bloody throat
bi-sected, di-ssected- am-ish- the shunning- her-of-him
the sister who wears make-up, whose hair curls just so,
the one who tells me what it is to be a woman.

She is not Caitlyn Jenner. I am not a cool Kardashian.
We don't have implants, an airbrush, good lighting or awards.
I didn't hear her called beautiful 10 times today
or a hero when she kept her factory job.

He was. They were. She is.
We are.
I am.


Krista Genevieve Farris lives in Winchester, Virginia with her husband and three sons. Her recent poems, essays and stories can be found in The Literary Bohemian, Right Hand Pointing, Cactus Heart, Shot Glass Journal, The Screech Owl, Brain, Child Magazine, Mamalode, Literary Mama, The Rain, Party and Disaster Society, Indiana Voice, Tribeca Poetry Review and elsewhere.

NEW YEAR, NEW SCANDAL

by Wayne Scheer

After being criticized for lip syncing through her Las Vegas residency debut, Britney Spears is now being accused of faking her abs.  --Huffpost Celebrity, December 31, 2012

The year is brand spanking new
and already Huffington Post
has broken a scandal
that could rock the world--
“Britney Spears Accused
of Faking Her Abs.”

Faking her abs?
Apparently, she uses makeup
for the rippling effect.

Is nothing sacred?
Next they'll uncover
Miley Cyrus has a secret
doctorate in astrophysics
or the Kardashian girls
as homebodies,
happily married,
content to play dominoes
before an open fire.

Who knows what else we'll learn
from Huff Post's crack reporters:
Mel Gibson born Melvin Ginsberg?
Jennifer Anniston wakes with morning breath?
John Wayne a transvestite?
(His birth name was Marion, after all.)

My world may be shattered,
my illusions swept away
like New Year's confetti on January 1,
but greeting the new year
with eyes wide open
has its advantages.
No more stomach crunches for me;
pass the body make-up.


Wayne Scheer has locked himself in a room with his computer and  turtle since his retirement. (Wayne's, not the turtle's.)  To keep from going back to work, he's published hundreds of short stories, essays and poems and has been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes and a Best of the Net. Wayne can be contacted at wvscheer(at)aol.com.