TROMPE-L’OEIL

by Suzanne Morris

Whenever I look at the

portrait of him 50 years ago

peering out from beneath

the smart billed cap

of his U.S. Army

dress uniform,

his eyes seem fixed on

grim reality:

he was drafted just before

his 25th birthday

during a war that he

already suspected

we should not be fighting,

and the casualties were

mounting at an alarming rate.

What a relief when he was made

a levee clerk in the Medical Corps,

posted at Fort Lewis, Washington.

Yet... sending others into action

while remaining safely behind

left its own set of scars.

Long after the war was over,

he suffered nightmares

of being under fire in Viet Nam.

I would lay beside him in the dark,

transfixed as he described

in terrifying detail

the first-hand experience of

a combat veteran.

This year I watched the

Memorial Day Concert on PBS,

with patriotic music and

stories of valor—

a resounding tribute to all who had died

defending American ideals

over the last 250 years.

By the time the show closed

with a haunting rendition of Taps

I was clutching his picture

against my heart,

knowing how grim

his face would be

had he lived long enough to see

the abdication of those ideals

by a President afflicted with

gilded bone spurs,

and thinking ahead to the

taxpayer-financed military parade

scheduled in Washington, D.C.

on June 14th,

a faux tribute to the U.S. Army that is

sure to make Trump’s pal Vladimir

red-faced with envy.

Anyone who dares to crash Trump’s

45-million-dollar birthday party

will be met with great force

as in the case of the protests

against his immigration raids in L.A.,

drafting U.S. troops

to engage in a war

they should not be fighting.

Suzanne Morris is a novelist with eight published works, and a poet. Her poems have appeared in online journals including The New Verse News and Texas Poetry Assignment, and anthologies including The Senior Class - 100 Poets on Aging (Lamar University Literary Press, 2024). A native Houstonian, she has resided in Cherokee County, Texas, since 2008. 

WHITE MAN'S BLUES

by James McKee

Musician and Trump supporter Kraig Moss sings and plays his guitar as South Carolina voters line —WNYC

Well I’m walking down the street,
There’s no English to be heard;
Yeah, I’m walking down my street,
Ain’t no English, not one word.
I was born in the First World;
Looks like I’ll be buried in the Third.


First they take away your job,
Send the factory off to Mexico;
Then they go after your woman;
Where she’s got to, I ain’t know;
Now they’re coming for what’s left,
Time for another Alamo.


I hear them say white man
With that look on they face;
Everybody saying white man
Like it have some nasty taste;
Seems like they forget
Who it was built this place.


Our daddies had it good,
Everybody knew God was white;
Our daddies kept it simple,
You were black if you weren’t white;
If that means they done wrong,
I got no use for doing right.


Prisons are full and getting fuller,
Because the law is the law.
How come we got so many prisons?
And who is it makes up the law?
Ask too many questions,
You find out what prison’s for.


In New York they call me racist,
Mock my accent and my state;
To L.A. I’m just a redneck,
Love two things, guns and hate;
But I’m the first to get a call
When there’s a war that can’t wait.


Had a dream last night:
A river of strangers rushing by;
No one hears me or sees me,
And then that flood, it runs dry.
I knew when I woke up
Nothing changes till I die.

James McKee and his wife live in New York City, in a neighborhood where the 1% seldom go.  A New Yorker by birth (and likely by death), he enjoys failing in his dogged attempts to keep pace with the unrelenting cultural onslaught of late-imperial Manhattan.  After taking a degree in English & Philosophy, he held a number of ludicrously unsuitable jobs before spending over a decade as a teacher and administrator at a small special-needs high school. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Raintown Review, Saranac Review, The South Carolina Review, THINK, Mobius, The Road Not Taken, The Worcester Review, The Lyric, The Rotary Dial, and elsewhere; one of his poems recently won the Sow’s Ear Review Poetry Contest, another is a finalist for the Dana Award for Poetry, and a third has been nominated for this year’s Pushcart Prize. He currently works as a private tutor and spends his free time, when not writing or reading, traveling less than he would like and brooding more than he can help.