ME AND THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

by CaLokie

Every public school classroom in Louisiana has been ordered to display a poster of the Ten Commandments. This one? Weird.

I come from a Bible Belt State where 
a majority of the people said 
they loved a God who 
they had never seen 
but voted for governors 
and legislators who 
passed Jim Crow laws which 
segregated themselves from 
fellow humans who 
could be seen. 

Now the Bible Belt state of Louisiana 
has passed a law requiring 
the Ten Commandments to be 
displayed in school classrooms despite 
the fact that there is no archeological or 
historical evidence of an exodus of 
a nation of slaves from Egypt led by 
the great emancipator 
and lawgiver, Moses. 

But having said that I have no 
problem with a public display of 
the ten commandments since 
I’m not a sculptor 
and have never made 
any graven image, nor 
any likeness of any thing 
that is in heaven above, nor 
that is in the earth beneath, nor 
that is in the water under the earth.
 
Moreover I have never coveted 
my neighbor’s manservant, nor 
his maidservant, nor 
his ox, nor 
his ass. 

Carl Stilwell (aka CaLokie) is a retired teacher who taught for over 30 years in the Los Angeles Unified school District. He was born during the depression in Oklahoma and came to California in 1959 and has lived there ever since. His pen name was inspired by the Joads’ struggle for survival in The Grapes of Wrath and the songs and life of Woody Guthrie. His poems have been published in Altadena Poetry Review, Blue Collar Review, Four Feather’s Press, Lummox, Pearl, Prism, Revolutionary Poets Brigade—Los Angeles, Rise Up, Sequoyah Cherokee River Journal, and The Sparring Artists. 

BÉLIZAIRE

by Suzanne Morris

after “Bélizaire and the Frey Children”  attributed to French portraitist Jacques Amans, 1837, acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2023

He stands tall, one shoulder

resting against a wide-girthed tree

on the pleasant green expanse

of a Louisiana plantation.

His arms are folded

contemplatively

across the front of his

tailored coat.

His face is solemn,

cheeks highly colored,

gaze fixed on some

point in the distance

as if he’s assessing

his place above

the three young,

open-faced siblings

in dainty frocks

standing below:

What might have led to an

enslaved youngster’s appearance

in a portrait of his

owner’s fair children?

And if this be vouchsafed by

sweet Heaven’s intent, then

might these

privileged youths

who boast to him of their

McGuffey Readers and are

well-versed in Bible stories

one day take up 

their writing pens and

set down the truth of

his people’s history?

Some sixty years hence,

the yoke of American

slavery broken,

Bélizaire’s noble figure

will be cunningly painted over

leaving his ghost to hover

between the artist’s vision

and the sunny sky, added later,

to obscure him.

The antebellum portrait of

three comely white children

will be forgotten

in the dark reaches

of attic and basement

until the dawn of the

21st century, when

Bélizaire’s figure

is finally restored

and the work receives

due veneration

the full franchise of 

his people bought with

calloused feet and heroes’ blood.

Yet now, less than

two decades passed,

Bélizaire looks down

contemplatively

from high up on a

museum wall

as a generation

come lately

forswearing the truth 

painstakingly written

again takes up the brush to

paint over him.   

Suzanne Morris is a novelist with eight published works.  Her poems have appeared inThe New Verse News and The Texas Poetry Assignment, as well as other online poetry journals, and anthologies.  A native of Houston, she now makes her home in Cherokee County, Texas.

IDA

by Terri Kirby Erickson

Floodwater surrounds a house on Sept. 01, 2021 in Jean Lafitte, Louisiana. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images via NPR)

In South Louisiana, every single thing we do is jazz or zydeco.

—Lauren Daigle

 

An old woman sits on her front porch in Jefferson

Parish, smoking a Kool and watching a copperhead

swim past her house. She is wearing her favorite pink

housecoat with the torn pocket, and hasn’t so much

as combed her hair in two days. Three feet above the

water line, she is safe from drowning and unwilling

to be rescued by a neighbor boy who keeps motoring

by in his daddy’s fishing boat and won’t take no for

an answer. She was making a roux when the power

went out, and left the mess right where it sat since it

was clear Ida had no intention of leaving Louisiana

without making a big fuss. BeauSoleil was playing

Zydeco Gris-Gris on the radio before the room went

silent, and that song keeps rattling around her head

while a red, high-heeled shoe lodges against a limb

rising from the torrent, its branches like the fingers

of an arthritic hand. Laughing out loud, she blows

a few puffs of smoke into the muggy air, recalling

a time when most men would have paid cash to see

Rosaline Mayeaux in red stilettos and nothing else.

She squints in the bright sunshine as that stubborn

boy steers the same old fishing boat up to her porch

for what she hopes will be his final run, and hollers

like she is deaf, “You about ready to hit the road,

Miz Mayeaux?” which says it all when it comes to

how much brain power he has going for him, since

no roads are visible after Hurricane Ida turned their

hometown of Jean Lafitte into a bowl of hot soup.

Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of six full-length collections of poetry, including A Sun Inside My Chest (Press 53), winner of the 2021 International Book Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared in “American Life in Poetry,” How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, The Sixty-Four: Best Poets of 2019, The Sun, The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, and numerous others. A former resident of Rapides Parish, she has lived most of her life in her home state of North Carolina.

LET US NOW PRAISE THE COMMON

by Darrell Petska

The Louisiana Supreme Court last week refused to review the life sentence imposed on Fair Wayne Bryant for “unsuccessfully attempting to make off with somebody else’s hedge clippers.” Chief Justice Bernette Johnson—the court’s first Black chief justice and the only Black justice on the court—identified Louisiana’s harsh habitual offender laws as a legacy of the state’s long history of abusive and racially biased punishment in her dissent from the court’s denial of review. “In the years following Reconstruction, southern states criminalized recently emancipated African American citizens by introducing extreme sentences for petty theft associated with poverty,” she wrote. “These measures enabled southern states to continue using forced-labor (as punishment for a crime) by African Americans even after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.” In Louisiana, these “Pig Laws”—so named because they targeted stereotypical “negro” crimes like stealing cattle and swine—“undoubtedly contributed to the expansion of the Black prison population that began in the 1870’s” by “lowering the threshold for what constituted a crime and increasing the severity of its punishment,” Chief Justice Johnson wrote. —Equal Justice Initiative, August 7, 2020. You can sign a petition to Free Fair Wayne Bryant at Change.org .

Into the light emerging, cicada-like,
singing his bold, particular song…

Comes Fair Wayne Bryant,
from whence to where unknown,
yet vibrant as budding day.

He takes what he finds,
though it may not be given him,
and the brash guard dogs howl.

He takes and takes what he finds,
because he has not, or ought not,
or knows not, so he does.

And away the guard dogs drive him,
far from song’s great intersection,
yet he sings, sings what he is

to unhearing walls, obscure skies,
and guard dogs protecting their bones.
To the light he is forgotten.

Thus passes Fair Wayne Bryant,
unrecognized, alone, shorn of hope,
yet like no other in the great Common.

And he takes with him what he finds:
souls, left untended and wanting,
that valued goods over good.

Darrell Petska lives in Middleton, WI. Some recent and forthcoming publications include Boston Literary Magazine, Willows Wept Review, Loch Raven Review, First Literary Review-East and Buddhist Poetry Review.

A PRAYER FROM LOUISIANA

by Gail White





God bless the oysters
I can eat alive
because they have no heartbeat.

God bless the feral cats
who have no control
over their fertility,
and the women who had it once
but lost it.

God bless the migrant children
who die in US custody
whose lives don’t matter
because they are post-unborn.

God bless the deer
To the hunters,
The fish to the net,
The faithful to their homes,
The children to their mothers’ arms.


Gail White is a formalist poet with work in many journals, including Measure, Light, First Things, and Hudson Review. She is a two-time winner of the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. Her latest book Catechism was published in 2016 by White Violet Press.

THINGS TO DO WHEN YOU'RE IN CHARGE DURING A FLOOD

by Diane Elayne Dees

Eat birthday cake in the Arizona desert.
If, however, you’re not invited to the party
like the other guy was, don’t despair:
Arizona still needs you, though it’s as dry
as a page torn from the Constitution.
There is work to be done in the West,
though relentless rain assaults Houston,
and parts of Texas look like a war zone.

You could briefly fly over and have an aide
explain to you what’s going on; it took only
moments to fly clueless over Louisiana.
After that, you’re free to leave what looks
like the end of the world in the hands
of the callous and incompetent.
Heck of a job.

But you like to do things your own way,
to break the rules because you can.

You could ride out the storm at Mar-a-Lago
while Texans sleep on the floors of shelters,
avoid the bunker while they wade through
flooded highways. Or you could gather
the press to remind them that Texas
gave you its electoral votes, and the streets
were mobbed for your inauguration.
And you could assure Texans, as they search
for gas, water, food, their furniture, their pets,
their sanity—that everything will be fine
because there soon will be a wall.

Diane Elayne Dees's poems have been published in many journals and anthologies, including Hurricane Blues: Poems about Katrina and Rita. Diane, who lives in Louisiana, also publishes Women Who Serve, a blog that covers women's professional tennis throughout the world.

NOT THE TIME

by David Chorlton

“This was slow and methodical,” [Bobby] Jindal said [of the Lafayette, LA movie theater shootings]. “It was barbaric.” The Republican governor, who is a candidate for the 2016 presidential nomination, was pressed on whether he should reconsider certain gun-control measures in the wake of the tragedy. He said now was “not the time” to discuss policy. —The Guardian, July 25th, 2015; file photo of Jindal at another time.

Remembering the shooter in a dark space
it all comes back in slow motion

but never slow enough
to be prevented. You might say

it was mysterious, the way the bullets
found random targets. All that remains

is to talk until no-one feels the pain,
as politics like poetry becomes

the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings:
it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.


David Chorlton grew up in England, in a time when Westerns were the favored theme in TV entertainment, never anticipating that he would one day live in Arizona, as he has since 1978. His poetry has appeared widely, and FutureCycle published his Selected Poems in 2014.

STAY-AT-HOME CITIZEN

by William Aarnes

Since the legislatures,
in cahoots with the NRA,

governors, presidents, and courts
have interfered with our right

to peacefully assemble,
I now venture out

no further than the garden
and the mailbox.

I have everything delivered,
stream my entertainment,

practice my faith online,
And, since I can request

ballots from home,
I vote absentee.


William Aarnes lives in South Carolina.