LONG LIVE THE CAGE

by Ron Shapiro

 

 

 

 

On the White House lawn,
the president has erected
a 90 foot tall structure
nicknamed “The Claw”
for a UFC fight on the
night of his birthday.
 
With the People’s House
in the background, a violent
battle with cuts, blood and bruising
will unfold on the front lawn.
 
Cheering on senseless cruelty with
the rage of Orwell’s Two Minute Hate,
movie stars, soldiers and politicians
will celebrate the moral rot of amerika.
 
And then it will be over.
 
But the president wants to the cage
and claw to remain long after as
a symbol of Greatness, a new landmark,
akin to the Eiffel Tower.
 
Not a bad idea especially if the structure
can be used for senators and congress people,
along with billionaires, to enter the octagon
and beat the crap out of each other.
 
Let policy be directed by who has the strongest
arms and legs or the best submission hold not
the biggest mouth and the loudest voice.
No more words dressed as manipulative
rhetoric. Grunts and groans now command
 
Attention. Schumer versus McConnell or
Owens against Allred? Let the people choose
the bouts then let ‘em go at it. Put the show
on Netflix. Encourage betting. Let winners
 
Decide what’s best for the country. With
one punch to the gut, a kick in the groin
or a two-finger eye poke, universal health
care, a tax on the wealthy right around the corner.
 
So keep the cage standing. It may be just what
this country needs to progress towards the future
and bend the moral arc a bit closer to justice.
 

 

Ron Shapiro, an award-winning teacher, has published over 20 poems in publications including Nova Bards 24 & 25, Virginia Writers Project, The New Verse News, Poetry X Hunger, Minute Musings, Backchannels, Gezer Kibbutz Gallery, All Your Poems, Paper Cranes Literary Magazine, Zest of the Lemon and two chapbooks: Sacred Spaces, Wonderings and Understory, a collection of nature poetry.  

WHERE THE MUSE LIES HIDDEN

by Michael Hogan

The taste of chocolate is cloying; the odor of burnt coffee clings to the kitchen.
The dog has given up for the day and lies sprawled against the tiles.
Netflix no longer beckons; you cannot bear another second-rate novel
or even “literature” which somehow today seems pretentious.
The garden planted, the house clean, dog fed and sleeping.
Exercise? Mindfulness? Facebook? emails?
Check, check, check, and CHECK!
And now here comes Boredom!
Like a dark nimbus cloud on a late afternoon
when the air is still as a vacuum
and you cannot divorce yourself from Self
It comes like a flood of viscosity, like mental syrup
clogging all the synapses with its oleaginous tentacles
signaling, I am here to stay, and you will be terribly unhappy
all the anchors of your sanity will disappear, and you will be adrift and bewildered
on a dreamlike sea, still awake but helpless.

There will be no thunderclap of relief in the stifling afternoon
no flash of lightning.
Just this
a slight urge to pick up a pen, a brush, an instrument
to write or paint or strike a chord.
And this is how the world begins again
how the light finds the trees and sparkles on the river
and a sudden shower lacquers the rose petals
and you create the world again.

Ignore it, and something dies, and something else will never be born.

Michael Hogan is the author of twenty-six books including the Irish Soldiers of Mexico which was the basis for an MGM film starring Tom Berenger and three documentaries. His work has appeared in numerous journals including The Paris Review, The Harvard Review, The Ohio Review, American Poetry Review, the Agni Review, New Letters, and others.  He currently lives in Guadalajara, Mexico with the textile artist Lucinda Mayo and their Dutch Shepherd, Lola.

MUSEUM OF IMPEACHMENT

by Anna M. Evans

After W.H. Auden

About the Republic, they were never wrong,
the Founding Fathers: how well they understood
Its vulnerability: how it could be taken down
While the people are ordering off Amazon or streaming Netflix dully along;
How, when the activists are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous vote, there always must be
Young people who did not specially want it to happen, eating
Avocado toast in a trendy new brunch place:
They never forgot
That probably the dreadful presidency must run its course
Anyhow on Fox News, the unlikely spot
Where the talk show hosts deny all facts (which is torture)
And then cut to a story about a horse.

In this Impeachment, for instance: how everyone turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the Republicans may
Have read the "transcript," considered forsaken Ukraine,
But for them it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the House Articles disappearing into the biased
Senate, and the expensive, delicate congressmen that must have seen
Something amazing, a president abusing his powers,
Had an election to get to and sailed calmly on.


Anna M. Evans’ poems have appeared in the Harvard Review, Atlanta Review, Rattle, American Arts Quarterly, and 32 Poems. She gained her MFA from Bennington College and is the Editor of the Raintown Review. Recipient of Fellowships from the MacDowell Artists' Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and winner of the 2012 Rattle Poetry Prize Readers' Choice Award, she currently teaches at West Windsor Art Center and Rowan College at Burlington County. Her new collection Under Dark Waters: Surviving the Titanic is out now from Able Muse Press, and her sonnet collection Sisters & Courtesans is available from White Violet Press.