GODZILLA VS KONG

by George Salamon


Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Friday officially filed as a candidate for the Alabama Democratic presidential primary … Bloomberg could jolt the Democratic primary race with his late entry and a personal war chest estimated at more than $50 billion.” The Hill, November 8, 2019

If two money monsters will fight
For the nation's greatest might
Yankee Doodle Dandy  has put
A feather of another color in his cap,
The one flying for democracy will
Have given way to one celebrating
The piracy of buying and selling,
Making business the only business
Of our fading political institutions.


George Salamon lives and writes in St. Louis, MO and has most recently contributed to The Asses of Parnassus, One Sentence Poems, Dissident Voice and TheNewVerse.News.

THE WILD WEST COMES EAST ON CITIBANK BIKES

A New York City Mayor’s Legacy
 
by Linda Lerner

Photo by Linda Lerner

I jump out of the way as
they come speeding out of the virtual world
wind blown sun dappled winding in
and out of traffic into heart stopping danger
ride under cover: faster cheaper works for everyone…

when I first saw those bikes corralled in stalls
through out the city I imagined horses,
the awful smell of horseshit
on the street, not the sanitized version of
another era’s get-a-way there for

for anyone to jump on
pay at one of the many stations afterwards
and return to a cyber safe house;
if along the way someone gets knocked down, hurt
a few keep riding as though nothing happened
others stop, bewildered, when an ambulance is called
and…couldn’t be…. they were in their proper lanes
                                                                 or when
 a truck door flies open smacking a biker
on the head  blood gushing out
the border marking two worlds blurs
the man taken to a hospital, stitched up, and released
doesn’t quite know which side he’s on
how he got so lost  why  or
what he needed to break out from


Linda Lerner's Takes Guts and Years Sometimes (New & Selected Poems) is published by New York Quarterly Press.