FALSE FLAG

by Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco


     
"Even among right-wing radio hosts, Alex Jones is a standout. Where Rush Limbaugh offers a torrent of conservative views that largely align with Republican policy preferences, Jones labels 9/11 an 'inside job.' Where Mark Levin touts radical constitutional theories that, nonetheless, have grown popular in Republican circles, Jones ties same-sex marriage on 'the eugenicist/globalist view.' Jones is the king of fringe conspiracy theories. Among other things, he may be the nation’s most prominent proponent of the view that the Sandy Hook shooting that killed 26 people an elementary school was a 'synthetic, completely fake — with actors, in my view — manufactured' hoax. And one hour before another terrible mass shooting occurred in San Bernardino, California on Wednesday, Jones hosted a very special guest on his radio show — Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump. 
     "Alex Jones' website, Infowars, already has an article suggesting the San Bernardino shooting was a false flag operation: https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/672235629577682944." --ThinkProgress.org



The night of,
we go out
to look at Christmas lights. There:
snow
made of white flashes
on a  lawn; a bony
reindeer.

Pale fog drifts in sweaty
heaps
across the windshield.

On the radio,
a man says
the attacks

are a false flag,
that he will not allow himself
to be

oppressed.

Does this make sense?

Down the street,
flashing blue lights
surround a door.

Jesus looks up
from a manger
on a roof

at distant stars.


Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California's Central Valley. Her work has appeared in TheNewVerse.News, The Potomac Review, Paper Nautilus, The Tule Review, and the Kentucky Review, among others.

I AM FROM A TURBULENT WORLD

by Elizabeth S. Wolf




I am from Paris.
I am drinking café,
watching football, screaming
along with the band.
I am from Beirut, being
bombed for what I am not.
I am from Jerusalem, being
stabbed for who I am
and who I love.
I am from Abu Ghraib
and some callow American youth
has me down on all fours, wearing
a leash for a dog.
I am back from Iraq
home in Colorado Springs
gunned down at
Planned Parenthood.
I am from Bangladesh, being
hacked by an axe for blogging a story.
I am a young man from New Hampshire
beheaded for trying to understand
the story to tell.
I am from San Bernadino and I go to
a special school where today
we were having a party when
the bad men burst in.
I am from Sandy Hook Elementary School.
I am from kindergarten, learning
the belly of a ‘b’ goes this way
and the belly of a ‘d’ goes that way
and bullets go everywhere.
I am from Syria but I am
running for my life and if I
do not die along the way,
I don’t know where I will arrive.
I am the truth, fractured into
thousands of brilliant faceted carats.
I am the glare so bright that one
sliver of truth is blind to
all of the others.

I am from Paris. I am
the unnamed young man towing
a piano, by bicycle, so that I can play
John Lennon’s “Imagine”
in front of the Bataclan Theater.
I am the hope that someday you will join us
and the world will live as one.


Elizabeth S. Wolf has previously published poems in local anthologies (Merrimac Mic: Gleanings from the First Year; 30 Poems in November 2014; Amherst Storybook Project). She lives in MA and maintains a day job as a Technical Metadata Librarian.