JUST ANOTHER DAY IN TRUMPMERICA… IS IT JUST ME?

by Robin Stevens Payes

Art by Adam Bissonnette at Michael Moore Substack

Tired, headachy, lethargic. Is it just me? Perhaps it’s the weather—80 degrees and sunny one day; 50 and foggy the next. The air is close, closing in. Maybe it’s not the weather. The world is closing in. Tariffs, abductions, mass firings. Check your feed. War, threats of war, trading wars. I’m stunned it’s only taken 73 days to destroy US, America the Beautiful. 250 years to build a never-perfect, ever-striving union. Less than a quarter of one to tear it down. Is it just me? Everything looks the same; people keep saying so. I must see for myself. I’m sitting in Panera over a chai tea latte. Frivolous purchase, I know. We are a beautiful hodgepodge of America here: women, men white, black, immigrant, young, old. People smiling and holding open doors for each other. Pleases and thank yous. Chess game in the corner. Regular kaffeeklatsch arguing over who knows what. Friends schmoozing. Babies cooing. Liberation Day. Is it just me? Liberating US from prosperity. Trade wars with friends. Who needs friends? Or lumber, paper, car parts. Semiconductors stranded. Champagne uncorked. Hurray, it’s Liberation Day, who’s rallying? Is it just me?  Domestic pain. Prices rise. Kentucky bourbon for US alone. Chickens no longer laying. Check your feed! Factory cows bellowing in pain for wont of milking. Grain rotting across the fruited plain. What’s a rally in reverse? Markets tumbling. Panicked 401k holders. Is it just me? Temporary, they say. The trumpists trumpet prosperity. Our full faith and credit: In Who We Trust? We have met the gangster and it is US. Oops, roped up the wrong bad guy. Tattoos—you know; they all look alike. All deportations final: no returns. Sorry, not sorry. This is the plan, they keep saying. Breaking news. Breaking US. Check our feed. A blizzard of factless, faceless counterfactuals blowing, billowing, burying US in unreason. Ah, but yes, there are faces. Starring Trump, Musk. Musk, Trump. Bit parts for SecDef, HHS, ICE. IRS, Treasury, because, billionaires. State, misstated. Walk-offs for WWE, monkeys in the GOP. Have you memorized your lines? Get your cues down! NEVER disagree.  Enemies gain. Deus ex machina Putin putting in appearances. Begin bombing. Erdogan saving Syria for Russia. China selling TikTok; keeping the algorithms. Keeping US in its cheap Big Data net. Digitize US. Creators creating AI fear it’s surpassed us. Why would Nero fiddle when AI’s mastered music from every composer ever? Better, cheaper, quicker. They’ve lost control. Just another day in Trumpmerica. We are a beautiful hodgepodge of America here: women, men white, black, immigrant, young, old. US. We the People must not loose our reign. Tired, headachy, lethargic. Rally on! I won’t lose control. Is it just me?

 

Robin Stevens Payes is a time traveler who reasons that time and space are just inconvenient rules that other people decided the world must follow. After decades of trying to fit some notion of “normal” she chose to dive deeper into the offbeat, allowing verse to fill a poetic void. She is author of the YA-time travel adventure book series, Edge of Yesterday. Her poetry has appeared in The New Verse News, Dawn Horizons, East Sea Bards, Maryland Bards Poetry Reviews, and Reflections. She is time traveling to retrieve fragments of her grandmother Sophie’s story in [re]member the world, weaving together poetry, memoir, history and science. She writes about the process of weaving memory into a tapestry on her Substack https://remembertheworld.substack.com/

MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, II

by Judith Terzi

This Miami Herald editorial cartoon dramatized the plight of Jewish refugees aboard the passenger ship St. Louis, a German ocean liner most notable for a single voyage in 1939, in which her captain, Gustav Schröder, tried to find homes for 908 Jewish refugees from Germany, after they were denied entry to Cuba, the United States and Canada, until finally accepted in various European countries, which were later engulfed in World War II. Historians have estimated that, after their return to Europe, approximately a quarter of the ship's passengers died in death camps. Cartoonist: Robert Epstein/Miami Herald Staff, June 11, 1939. Caption text thanks to Wikipedia.

Creamy tomato basil soup, a hunk
of baguette at Panera, table #36.
I hear Korean spoken next to me,
two women in animated talk. I'd

like to understand. A father speaks
Arabic to his baby boy. The mother,
highlighted hair, chic jeans. They're
at my favorite table next to the fire-

place. I hear Spanish, Armenian. We
are 10 miles from the largest Armenian
diaspora in America. I hear almost no
English today, like sometimes at mega-

stores where you can't buy one roll
of toilet paper, a single box of tissues,
or a solo tube of toothpaste. Or, I
recall at the top of the Eiffel Tower

before it blushed tricolor in mourning.
The non-talkers here stare into computer
screens between mouthfuls of turkey chili
or a Frontega chicken panini. Here is

the gusto, the throb, the intonation of
America. Here, you can travel without
having to make reservations. I imagine
Delancey Street at the turn of the 20th:

Italian, Ukrainian, German, or the Yiddish
of my grandparents pulsing, reminiscing
between pushcarts, theater seats, newspaper
boys. Or what about on the St. Louis,

ship touching Cuban and U.S. shores with
refugees unwanted, then having to sail them
back to a Europe soon at war? Exhalation for
some. But no Exile, no unshackling from fear.


Judith Terzi's most recent chapbook, If You Spot Your Brother Floating By, is a collection of memoir poems from Kattywompus Press. Her poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies including Atlanta Review (International Publication Award, 2015), Caesura, Myrrh, Mothwing, Smoke: Erotic Poems (Tupelo), Raintown Review, Unsplendid, and Wide Awake: The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond (Beyond Baroque). She lives and writes in Southern California.