I WILL MISS THE LARGE ANIMALS OF NORTH AMERICA

by Michael Brockley

Woody Guthrie in March 1943.

The bison. The grizzly bears. The jaguars that can’t leap over the wall along the border river. I will miss reading irreverent books. Novels where Jesus has a friend named Biff. Comic books where Deadpool is a hero. I will miss news reporters who know that Kansas City is in Missouri and that Benjamin Franklin never resided in the White House. I will miss the White House. The Smithsonian, the Statue of Liberty, and Yellowstone. I will wonder how Old Faithful might be disappeared. I will miss pennies. And the Beatitudes, the part of the Bible Kurt Vonnegut valued the most. I will miss voting for women. I will miss movies that tell the stories of men and women who don’t look like me. I will miss being able to see Venus and Mars on clear nights. I will miss strawberries and tomatoes and watermelons and sweet potatoes and cranberries and sunflowers and cherries. I will miss guitars with This Machine Kills Fascists scrawled across their bodies. I will miss dogs that look more like wolves than weapons of war. I will miss saying  Feliz Navidad, Fröhliche Weihnachten, and Mele Kalikimaka. I will miss finger-pointing songs. I will miss licorice. Yes, I will even miss licorice.

Michael Brockley is a retired school psychologist who lives in Muncie, Indiana, His prose poems have appeared in Last Stanza Poetry Journal, Red Eft Review, and Unlikely Stories Mark V. Brockley's prose poems are also forthcoming in Ley Lines Literary Review, Seat at the Table, and Alien Buddha.

#LOVETRUMPSHATE

by Brian Glaser

Levi Snyder-Allen dressed as a wolf when he joined his mother Diana at a North Dakota oil pipeline protest. The wolf is an endangered species in North Dakota. About 30 protestors gathered for a "Stand With Standing Rock" demonstration against the North Dakota Access Pipeline in Santa Ana on Saturday. (Photo by Bill Alkofer, Orange County Register/SCNG Nov. 27, 2016)

By ordering construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline to resume, the President is participating in one of this country’s oldest traditions—repressing Native Americans.

—Bill McKibben, The New Yorker online, February 8, 2017

Dakota Access protesters vow 'mass resistance.' 
They will be hard to stop. 

—CNBC, February 8, 2017

“No trespass, no peace.”
That’s the chant as my son heard it when we stood
with thirty others
at a Santa Ana intersection
to show solidarity with the water protectors of Standing Rock.
As a beginner, I was impressed by the preparation of the young woman
who had organized the gathering:
not only summoning us all,
but the extra signs, bilingual informative flyers, a whistle to acknowledge
the gestures of agreement from passing cars.
And the chants, begun across the street from where we stood,
connecting us like impalpable thread.
Just today, the Army announced that it will shut down
the encampment blocking the black snake
in December.
Kurt Vonnegut said of the afterlife that one might have to choose
an age to remain for eternity.
I might choose sixty-five or so,
I think, but forced to commit to one I would miss
the overtones and undertones and ironies
with which the chant describes the changing years
of my already forty-three:
no trespass, no peace.

Brian Glaser has worked as a grant writer, a dramaturge, and a professor, and he has created six environmentally themed courses at his current school, Chapman University. Glaser has published more than thirty poems, translations, essays and reviews.

1984 + 2016 = SO IT GOES

by Lylanne Musselman

@kailadougherty

Over I-94 and Belleville Road
in Midwest Michigan a drone
hovers, flits, and zooms eerily
gathering information on every-
day people; common seagulls
enjoying their routine dips and
gathering of leftover bread littered
on the ground, whine as the spirited
intruder interrupts their communion—
the white cloaked birds lift in flight,
screeching prophetic warnings in unison.

The constant hum, droning on and on
draws nearer to me as the birds scatter
farther and farther away, catches
my attention with its foreign presence,
diverting my thoughts from the page
and the once calm moment with a latte
to how absurd life in America has become—
Orwell warned us, Vonnegut imagined it,
their science fiction has finally invaded
our reality.

Lylanne Musselman is an award winning poet, playwright, and artist. Her work has appeared in Pank, Flying Island, TheNewVerse.News, The Rusty Nail, So it Goes, Issue 3 and many anthologies.  A two-time Pushcart nominee, Musselman is the author of three chapbooks, and she co-authored Company of Women: New and Selected Poems (Chatter House Press, 2013). Presently, she teaches writing at IUPUI, Ivy Tech Community College, and American National University.