GREAT MEN

by Kyle Gervais

 after Robinson Jeffers

Consider greatness.
A great man must have a following, and this is true,
as death, of Trump, who pulls like a fear-blind buffalo
the pressed herd onward, downward, over the land’s edge
to an imagined security. Kanye too is great,
is he not, in his crazy rage, and a yearning
turning, centrifuge fast, to an ever darker love?
But Elon’s greatness outpaces even these, demonstrably, incontrovertibly, 
one hundred twenty million 
massed numbers following him where he flutters, of all
such vast images that are not good, but great,
today the greatest.

Kyle Gervais teaches Classical Studies at the University of Western Ontario in London, where he lives with his husband and two cats. He has poems in Arion, Canadian Literature, Classical Outlook, Eunoia Review, The New Verse News, Litbreak Magazine, PRISM international, and elsewhere.

FIRE THE NEXT TIME

by George Salamon

“Severe heat and drought the hallmarks of a changing west… Unless people drastically reduce planet-warming emissions, the world faces a future of increasingly frequent and severe environmental disasters: coastal flooding, mass extinctions, deadly hurricanes, uncontrollable wildfires.” —The Washington Post, June 20, 2021. Photo: Boats sit unused in Lake Oroville, Calif., on Tuesday. A severe water level drop in the lake has forced about 130 houseboats to be removed. (Melina Mara / The Washington Post)

The worship of money

and machines made us

vile and ugly, nobility

and beauty live in

inanimate things, in

flowing waters and in

moving clouds, in

animals of the wild

green and blue depth,

we sold our souls to

delusions that kept the

people marching down

to nothing at the end of

their dream.

A poet wrote that he'd

"burn his right hand in 

a slow fire to change

the future." The future

has arrived, and we'll 

burn in its fire.

George Salamon lives and writes in St. Louis, MO.