HE'S THEIR MAN

by Orel Protopopescu

To the tune of "I'm Your Man" with apologies to Leonard Cohen

If he needs a liar
They’ll say anything he wants them to
And when his pants catch fire as they do
They’ll push his point of view
When he tries to sell his corporate brand and
When he needs to keep an aide or witness
Off the stand
He’s their man

If they ask for players
He won’t run onto the field for them
But when he needs naysayers
There is nobody they won’t condemn
If he’s got remittances to hide
Or when he wants to take us for a ride
He knows he can
He’s their man

Ah, the truth’s too bright
And the noose too tight
The world can’t go to sleep
While he’s making good on his vows to the hood
In Moscow where his debts run deep.

Ah, but no one ever got a country back
By abandoning the race
While he smirks for the cameras with a blade in his sheath
Or howls at his rallies like a dog in heat
Or he claws through our laws while we’re gnashing our teeth
And tells his base (so base!)
I’m your man

And if we lose our way along this road
They’ll let him steer for us
And as he adds more carbon to our load
They’ll let him crash the bus

If you want a future for your child
Or only want to walk in peace a while across this land . . .
He’s not your man

Orel Protopopescu won the Oberon poetry prize in 2010 and a commendation in the Second Light Live competition, 2016. Her poems have appeared in TheNewVerse.News, Light Poetry Magazine, Lighten Up Online, and paper-based reviews and anthologies. Her book of translations (with Siyu Liu) A Thousand Peaks, Poems from China was honored by the NYPL. Other publications: a book for teachers of poetry, prize-winning picture books, a bilingual poetry app for children and a chapbook What Remains. She is currently completing work on a biography of the legendary ballerina, Tanaquil Le Clercq.

JANUARY 13TH, 2017

by Marc Swan

https://www.womensmarch.com

In a short hop against convention, my wife
and I were married on a Friday the 13th. Today
a road trip to honor one. We drive to Belfast, two
hours north, to the Farmer’s Market. My wife’s
a large fan of fresh produce even in wintertime. We
meet a local farmer with twenty-three water buffalo.
I’m staggered by the number, more shocked by how
they survive. This isn’t India or Southeast Asia. She
assures me they have a warm barn, plenty to eat.
My wife buys milk for yogurt. The farmer tells us,
you’ll be amazed. I’m starting to feel the healthy
pull of the day. We travel route one to Rockland
for lunch, the warmth of an Irish cafe. Good food,
friendly staff generous with their time, tables fill
as people trundle in from the cold wind blowing
outside. From here we drive south to Wiscasset
to see a favorite shop owner who in short order
expresses her growing feelings about the election.
Every Friday thru the holidays she’s been donating
twenty per cent of her sales to five nonprofits that
will likely be battered under the new regime.
Her heart sings Cohen’s “Hallelujah" as we talk
of support for those things that separate thinking
folks from those who think chaos should reign.
Across the street in another store, a saleslady we’ve
never met senses our liberal lean. Running her hands
thru her thick blond-tinted hair, she talks of the march
in Washington and how important it is to be there—
she will “next Saturday.” Eyes water as she goes
on about rip and tear on what was once understood
as democracy too quickly becoming something
with another name from lessons never learned:
fascist, authoritarian, despotic and in these
difficult times we live, simply wrong.

Marc Swan’s poems have recently been published or forthcoming in Scrivener Creative Review, Crannóg, Mudfish, Gargoyle, Nuclear Impact Anthology, Coal City Review, among others. He lives with his wife Dd in Portland Maine. 

SPECTRUM: NOVEMBER 8, 2016

by Deborah Kahan Kolb

The day the red-ones drew the curtains and chose the orange-one
to mind the white oval that had embraced the black-one
nearly three thousand days --- that day

was the day the blue-ones formed
a veined parenthesis to contain the pulsing mass
of the red-ones, spilling sideways,

was the day the red-ones and the blue-ones
never turned to purple and the green-ones
stayed scattered, shoots pushing up to be counted,

was the day the brown-ones huddled and burst, and
waited for the white-ones, the eye-holed pointed ones,
to bear a burning broken cross, its twisted arms akimbo,

was the day the pink-ones, like the blue-one who
missed her grip at the finish, snatched steel from
between their legs and bound themselves each to each,

was the day the tan-ones veiled themselves
into invisibility,

was the day the yellow-ones shifted, and strove
for the exits,

was the day the beige-ones bent double, and breathed
dios mio,

was the day the rainbows clung together, their colors melted
and shriven,

was the day a keening Hallelujah rose up from the teeming streets
and evanesced into the violet sky,

was the day I waited for the raging ones to bring a yellow star
for me.

Deborah Kahan Kolb is the author of the forthcoming chapbook Windows and a Looking Glass (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in Poetica, Veils, Halos & Shackles, and Voices Israel. She lives in Bronx, NY. 

FOR THE PLEASURES OF SERIOUSNESS

by David Chorlton

“But I think there's an appetite for seriousness. Seriousness is voluptuous, and very few people have allowed themselves the luxury of it. Seriousness is not Calvinistic, it's not a renunciation, it's the very opposite of that. Seriousness is the deepest pleasure we have. But now I see people allowing their lives to diminish, to become shallow, so they can't enjoy the deep wells of experience. Maybe it's always been this way, when the heart tends to shut down. If only the heart shut down and there were no repercussions, it would be O.K., but when the heart shuts down, the whole system goes into a kind of despair that is intolerable." —Leonard Cohen to Anjelica Huston in Interview, November 1992

Strange, how a voice
can stay beside a person
for forty years without
its owner ever
stepping forward to be
introduced. On a cold night
in Vienna the vinyl
sang “Suzanne” for company
in a small apartment
with no view except
onto a lonely courtyard
starlight could not reach.
“It’s four in the morning . . . “
and always was
even on the radio
AM show. “Howdy”
said the host in his best
Austrian-English before
pronouncing Le-on-ard Co-hen
to introduce a song
that matched the weather.
Years later, in an Arizona
mining town
entering retirement
a poet set the needle down
and “One by one the guests arrived”
across the desert hills.
Deeper now
and deepening, the timbre
ripened with experience
passing through years
stained by war until it
could “run no more
with that lawless crowd
while killers in high places
say their prayers out loud.”
Everybody knows
what he referred to
while few could say it
with such elegant simplicity.
Out walking, when
a song came uninvited
to mind, it told me “We are ugly
but we have the music.”
It could plead
for “the light in the land of plenty
to shine on the truth someday.”
Whiskey warm
and cured in decades
of cigarette smoke
the voice endured
with a smile depression
can’t erase. In my Secret Life
I smile too, but in recognition
more than humor.
A man in his mid-seventies
ran skipping onto stage
to perform the soundtrack
for many of our lives. He was
still reading our collective minds
while opening his own.
He left the stage
the time I saw him
after three hours with a thousand
people, addressing us
one by one.

David Chorlton first heard Leonard Cohen songs on Austrian radio when he lived in Vienna. Since moving to Phoenix in 1978 he has kept up with new releases in between excursions to enjoy Arizona's landscape and wildlife. His Selected Poems was published by FutureCycle Press in 2014.

BRIEFLY BOWIE

by Guillermo Filice Castro

Last
night
I was
Bowie

briefly

gliding
from
empty
office
to
empty
office

asking
each
time

where’s
the dance?

only to continue
bowie-ing
my way
through
transparent
walls

in a pearl
grey suit
that
was

more
Cohen
than
Bowie

more

femme
than
butch

never
finding
anybody

much less the dance

my eyes
under a wide-
brimmed
hat

stage-worn
& hushed

as Mars


Guillermo Filice Castro is the author of Agua, Fuego (Finishing Line Press, 2015). He’s a recipient of an Emerge-Surface-Be fellowship from the St. Mark’s Poetry Project. A native of Argentina, he now resides in New York City.