THE DAY I FOUND OUT TIMOTHY SNYDER MOVED TO CANADA

by Nan Ottenritter

after “The Day Lady Died,” a lunch poem by Frank O'Hara

It is 12:20 pm in Richmond, VA a Monday

several days after Saturday Night Live’s skit

featuring James Austin Johnson 

portraying President Trump airs.

I will watch more TV news tonight.

Yes, perhaps not a great idea.

 

Dinner is served on TV table trays, 

7:00 pm sharp to see if Amna will join Geoff

on the PBS News Hour, and learn about 

what they consider important 

                                     

    I scroll, remote in hand,

to my YouTube library, search TCM for a 

movie I might have saved, and do what I

swear I wouldn’t – start watching recorded 

segments of Rachel and Lawrence and 

Amanpour (I like her the best. What’s not

to like about Walter Issacson interviewing

Ron Chernow about Mark Twain?)

Holy cow! Life in TV-media-land is good

 

so I opt out and switch to another streaming 

service to pick up an interview with one of my

favorite authors on fascism—Timothy Snyder.

The interviewer asks about his living in 

Canada now—what’s it like? The food in my 

stomach curdles 

 

and I learn that his academic inquiry resulted

in a move to Canada. He said the move had nothing 

to do with Trump. But for a moment I paused and 

imagine many, along with me, stopped breathing

Nan Ottenritter has published chapbooks Eleanor, Speak (Finishing Line Press, 2021) and My Year 2023 (2024).  She co-edited Discovery, Recovery: A Journey with Veterans (2023) and has been published in Artemis, Still Points Quarterly, Poetry Society of Virginia Anthologies, Dissent: an anthology to end war and capitalism (2023), and Writing the Land: Virginia (NatureCulture LLC, 2024). Her concern about American democracy has prompted her to read and understand the books of contemporary historians and host informal Citizens' Salons with friends, neighbors, and strangers in informal settings. 

A PALER BIRD

In Memory of Sinéad O’Connor

by Diane Elayne Dees

She searched for God,

she searched for self,

she searched for a safe place

to build a nest and nurture

the fragments of her soul. 

The Magdalene Laundries

tried to wash her clean;

she suffered alone,

slept with the dying,

and—though forced into silence—

her voice escaped the prison.

Her voice—the voice that sang 

like an angel, the voice that told 

the truth that no one wanted to hear—

could not be silenced.

Her nerves on fire, her joints

inflamed, her past injecting pain

into her flesh and bone every moment— 

she shaved her head, cast off husbands,

cast off criticism, searched harder for God,

lost her child, lost her hope.

She was the pain felt by thousands,

the truth ignored by millions,

the voice of the screaming unheard,

the voice that will never be silenced.

Diane Elayne Dees is the author of the chapbooks, Coronary Truth (Kelsay Books), The Last Time I Saw You (Finishing Line Press), and The Wild Parrots of Marigny (Querencia Press). Diane, who lives in Covington, Louisiana, also publishes Women Who Serve, a blog that delivers news and commentary on women’s professional tennis throughout the world.

DAVE CHAPPELLE

by Judy Juanita

Dave Chappelle returned for his third stint as host of “Saturday Night Live,” which gave the controversial comedian a starring role in an episode dominated by the midterm elections and the fallout from Kanye West’s antisemitic remarks. —The Washington Post, November 13, 2022

you're looking 

malcolmish

dave 

if only you hadn't walked 
from fifty million dollars
empire wouldn't have known
 
if only you'd been ridiculous
you could be feted
and ignored by all
 
if malcolm had been mediocre 
and not stood up to empire
he would be almost 100 years old
 
while you buck empire over and over
making your black ass
a target 
 
empire smiles all malcolmish
giving any judas permission to kill 
ask malcolm 
 
standing in the audubon ballroom
looking malcolmish
knowing what was coming

Judy Juanita's poetry collection Manhattan my ass, you're in Oakland won the American Book Award 2021 from the Before Columbus Foundation. Winner of the Tartt Fiction Prize at the University of West Alabama [UWA], her short story collection The High Price of Freeways was published by Livingston Press [UWA] in 2022. Her short story, "The Black House," was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2022, and her poem “Bling” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2012. Her semi-autobiographical novel Virgin Soul is about a young woman who joins the Black Panther Party in the 60s (Viking, 2013). She appears in Netflix’s Last Chance U: Season 5, Laney College.  She teaches writing at University of California, Berkeley.

MY LITTLE TYRANT

by Sergio A. Ortiz

Image source: The Onion

And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.

Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.

—Donald Trump

You stopped to desire what you looked at,

you stopped to invent what you looked at,

but you were never at a standstill. 

You understood the docks, the places
where salt is a blind lady seated on your soul,
where foam gnaws at the base of everything,
with its small teeth resembling
the quicksand of what is forgotten,
the sites where old anchors and barges
of oversize engines oxidize in droppings
of seagulls and pelicans, the small white tumults
where peace and movement intertwine
their nets in the old-fashion-way of the sea,
the landscapes that surrounded you
without you knowing how far from your imagination,
your most intimate arguments could travel.

There is a sky full of vessels that eyes contemplate
from below tears, from where your gaze runs out of breath.

An eternity that anyone could say,
is worn out by extreme use, fondled by the dead,
softened by the complaints of the sick,
an afternoon that is sinking like a boat
in a landscape that belongs to nobody else but you.

You understood most of this,
you distrusted your desire, but it was your saliva
that shone on the teeth of your desire,
you were the doughy dough someone chewed
the dough that ended up in your stomach.
It was your hand, the one with which you said goodbye.

That is why you hesitated in the middle of the night,
you heard the trees get lost in their branches,
you felt the wind halt, as if in search of something
between the folds of the curtain, you heard the dead
laugh in their holes imitating moles,
you will discover oblivion, let it walk into your bedroom
dressed as a butler to announce what is already served at the table.

Unintentionally you will dine with great appetite and at the end,
leaving the napkin on the table, you will praise the menu.

Sergio A. Ortiz is a gay Puerto Rican poet and the founding editor of Undertow Tanka Review. He is a two-time Pushcart nominee, a four-time Best of the Web nominee, and a 2016 Best of the Net nominee. His poems have been published in hundreds of journals and anthologies. He is currently working on his first full length collection of poems, Elephant Graveyard.

DONALD TRUMP, KATE MCKINNON, LEONARD COHEN

by Jaimee Hills





Are people safe? You've struck a chord
as we become an angry horde.
Appreciate the optics, now you’ve stopped her.
With painted signs, they chant, they sing,
the minor crowd, assembling,
as cloudy skies compose a helicopter.

A vote inside a vote machine
meaningless but for what it could mean
felt like gambling in a bankrupted casino.
The votes rolled in, in waves like water;
the careless don’t care about my daughter,
heat rising like the shock of jalapeño.

Though someone else's dream is you,
dream on we do, dream on we do,
hardy as the gardens of Pompeiians.
The flowers find the seasons strange,
there’s a changing to their change,
squalled shorelines and the stooping Himalayans.

It’s not illegal just to breathe.
We’ve always struggled. Always seethe.
It feels the wind is howling, blowing through you.
Within the ocean's current form
a shifting rage, a stirring storm,
the bitter burning tongue of Hallelujah.


Jaimee Hills is the author of How to Avoid Speaking, winner of the 2014 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. She has been a featured reader in the O.B. Hardison Poetry Series at the Folger Shakespeare Library and her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Mississippi Review, Drunken Boat, Blackbird, and elsewhere. She teaches at Marquette University and lives in Milwaukee, WI.