THE CON MAN AND THE DEVIL

by Scott Talbot Evans

Graphic via Red Bubble

There once was a con man of ill-gotten wealth.

Many counterfeit trophies cluttered his shelf.

He prided himself on his great mental health,

And made known to the world he’d done well for himself.

 

He built monuments, palaces, and towers so high,

That they threatened to poke God Himself in the eye.

The man was so crooked, unscrupulous, and sly,

That Satan decided to give him a try.

 

“Nice to meet you. I’m the Prince of Perdition.

I can see you’re a man of blinding ambition.

If it’s not too much of an imposition,

I offer a once in a life proposition.”

 

“What are you bothering a busy man for?

Can’t you see I have houses and women galore?

What could you possibly add to my score?”

The devil grinned widely and simply said, “More.”

 

“You will boast and brag. Your horn will be tooted.

The masses will fall for you as if struck by Cupid.

They won’t even notice their pockets you looted.

They will believe every word you say, no matter how stupid.”

 

“You will split the world in chaotic division.

Your critics will charge you with crimes and derision,

But my lawyers will twist every fact and decision,

So you won’t spend a single minute in prison.”

 

“I need more. I want banners to herald my name,

In bold proclamation of my unequaled fame.

The public must shower me with so much acclaim,

That it puts Alexander and Caesar to shame.”

 

“You drive a hard bargain. I find you quite droll.

In return for all that, you must pay a small toll,

A possession you won’t even miss on the whole,

A little thing commonly known as your soul.”

 

“Is that all?” The cheater started to squeal.

His eager excitement he tried to conceal.

“Looks like I found myself quite a steal.

Okay, buddy, you’ve got yourself a deal!”

 

They smiled and squinted. Their slimy hands shook.

Lucifer wrote the fool’s name in his book.

And that little scribble was all that it took,

For somewhere in hell an ember started to cook.

 

The man’s fame suddenly started to rise.

Half the world believed all his terrible lies.

His power and ego increased to king-size.

He was hailed as a savior in his followers’ eyes.

 

He invented false dangers to control people’s fears

And inflamed their angers to arouse their cheers.

His empire grew on prejudice and smears,

And contempt from his critics was music to his ears.

 

He hobnobbed with hoodlums, gangsters, and whores.

Tyrants and despots were his secret mentors.

He suppressed opposition with threatening roars,

And brought discord and riots to once peaceful shores.

 

He had unholy power to swindle and cheat.

Honesty and integrity took a back seat.

In no time he rose to the world’s highest seat.

But he could not rest ‘til his gluttony was complete.

 

Every ruler and judge was under his heel.

At his feet, the world’s nations were obligated to kneel.

All the lands and possessions were marked with his seal.

And then he sighed, because there was nothing left to steal.

 

He heard a crack, and there was a puff of smoke.

The demon stood before him in a long flowing cloak.

From the heart of darkness a raspy voice spoke.

“The dream is over. Time for you to get woke.”

 

Beelzebub grinned like a fiend and he said,

“The clock has run out, now. Guess what. You are dead.

Forget all the dreams in your silly head.

Fall to your knees and fill yourself with dread.”

  

“I have kept my bargain to the final dot.

The whole world and everything in it is what you got.

You had your fill, and that is saying a lot.

And now I shall take what is mine on this very spot.”

 

The snake’s eyes glowed and he sounded a gong.

A choir of demons sang a tormented song,

But the whole thing went on for a little too long.

“What is happening here? Something is wrong.”

 

The serpent looked for the man’s pain to begin.

But there wasn’t any, to his great chagrin.

From the corpse’s eyes arose a sparkle from within,

And his wrinkled lips curled into a wicked grin.

 

“I told you I was the best dealmaker bar none.

You shoulda read the fine print when you first begun.

I agreed to give you my soul when all was done,

But the joke’s on you, Satan, because I never had one.”

 

The cheat convulsed with laughter to the point of tears.

The joyful sound burned like acid on the devil’s ears.

“This is the first time I’ve been swindled in all my years.

He bowed. “From one con artist to another, cheers!”

Scott Talbot Evans' poems are published in Poetry Salzburg Review, Samjoko Magazine, and Straight On Till Morning. He was twice a finalist in The New Yorker caption contest and won the GEVA Theater 2 Pages/2 Voices competition and the Script Studio Scriptitude Competition. His work appears in Amazing Stories, Weekly Humorist, Shoreline of Infinity, Creepypod, and Crimeucopia. His novel The Love Police was released last year. He is working on his sixth book.

NOT QUITE SYNONYMS

by Paul Hostovsky

The name-sign for Ron DeSantis
in American Sign Language
is exactly the same as the sign 
for Satan, according to my deaf
informants at the Florida School
for the Deaf and the Blind
in St. Augustine. The etymology
of that name-sign may have something to do
with the visual similarity (deaf people 
are intensely visual, after all) between 
the letters in Satan and the letters in Santis, 
or it may have something to do 
with the similarity of their policies–
for example, their shared affinity
for burning, and also their preference
for darkness and the benighted 
over the light of day and the being fully 
awake. Bottom line, if you ever happen
to eavesdrop on some deaf people 
animatedly signing about Ron DeSantis,
it would be a forgivable and understandable mistake
if you thought they were talking about Satan,
because although they're not quite synonyms
they are unmistakably homonyms in ASL.

Paul Hostovsky makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter. His newest book of poems is Pitching for the Apostates (forthcoming, Kelsay Books).

DELUGE

by Alejandro Escudé

The Los Angeles River flows at a powerful rate as a huge storm brings flooding and landslides to the west coast. Photograph: David McNew/Getty Images via The Guardian, January 16, 2023

I listen to Paradise Lost

in my car as the rain pours

at night, picturing the first 

couple as they huddle among 

the grasses and fruits.

From my car window, as if 

up toward heaven, I see an

uphill rain-slick boulevard, 

passenger planes landing 

at LAX, like blurry UFO’s.

The sound is exhilarating,

an aquatic thrashing, my car

sloshing over corner oceans,

the wipers struggling to sweep

a sinless version of the city.

I roll the window down

just as Satan calls out his 

fellow seraphim, like a zillion

tuna schooling out of a 

darkened precipice. 

Even if it’s atmospheric, 

and a river, it’s still rain, 

the wind wind, the forecast?

Our fallen state, our bodies

water-logged, the reflection 

of all the lights at night

splitting heaven and hell

into equal refractions.

Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

RED DOMINION, THE TRANSITION: RATED R

by Alejandro Escudé

Illustrated | Mark Wilson/Getty Images, Lebrecht Music & Arts/Alamy Stock Photo via The Week

T***p stands at the top of the White House steps
holding an assault rifle: “Say hello to my little friend!”
he screams as the army rushes to arrest him, explosions
everywhere; in the Oval Office desk, dozens of encrypted
Russian messages, a diagram of an experimental aircraft
inside his seven iron, and the button, beneath the bust
of Taft, he pushed to open a passage to a bullet tram
leading directly to Moscow, on the way blasting by
Satan himself, his wild angel wings, demons wearing
MAGA caps raise their claws as he speeds through,
the tram, shaped like the cockpit of a 747, painted black
with T***P in red on its side; the final station is made
of gold, supporters and strippers greet him in Moscow;
police whisk him up a marble staircase to a glass elevator
and into a luxury hotel room near Red Square where
he’s met by a few KGB officials awaiting his last report
which T***p recites in precise Russian as he removes
the prosthetic face he has worn for decades, unveiling
a remarkable resemblance to Lenin; he runs a hand
over his bald head, the window open, sound of traffic
outside. Trump holds up a rumpled wig and smiles.


Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

WOW! HE TWEETS

by Ron Riekki

When he writes “Wow!”
he really means
the opposite of Mom,
the word flipped
upside-down
like families
he’d love to drown.

Ron Riekki wrote U.P. and edited The Way North (2014 Michigan Notable Book), Here (2016 Independent Publisher Book Award), And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing (Michigan State University Press, 2017), and Undocumented (with Andrea Scarpino, MSU Press, 2019).

ANTENORA

by Alejandro Escudé

after Dante Alighieri

There is Jared Kushner encased in ice
Packed close to Trump gnawing

On Kushner’s head, the two shades
Wrapped in ice sheets reflecting

A mounting body of dishonesty,
A gold, Cyrillic script disappearing

As it appears, the demons awake
Long as the scroll takes, unwinding

Then winding again while the brute
Chews his son-in-law’s brain casing.

Silent, the pale skull, save for murmurs
Of a backchannel to Satan’s wing.

Beside these, Michael Flynn pecks
The bodies of wicked soldiers offering

Themselves to the stern-faced bird
Whose frozen beak prevents dining.

All this I see, with my poet guide,
Walt Whitman, beside me, the fattening

Of America, its undoing, still circles
Ahead of us, more furies unfurling.


Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

REBIRTH

by Howard Winn

Image: “Rudy Giuliani’s Scar Power Grabs” by Keith Seidel for Washington Monthly Magazine

Floundering in the sea of anonymity
with head barely above the surface
weighted with the concrete blocks
of three wives some past but always
present he was desperate to be important
again in a world that had left him
behind if not the eight-ball at least
the news of the day and that coveted
spot in the political power structure
where he could be someone rather
than no one so he embraced the Satan
of the moment masquerading as the
savior who would recreate the past
that was now irrelevant in the present
complexity of society and truth from
science as well as standards from
faith had to be denied in order to be-
come important once more so again
he could be America’s heroic mayor.


Howard Winn's work has been published in Dalhousie Review, Galway Review, Descant. Antigonish Review, Southern Humanities Review, Chaffin Review, Evansville Review, and Blueline. His latest work is Acropolis, a novel published by Propertius Press. He is Professor of English at SUNY-Dutchess.

HEADLINE: DONALD TRUMP RETWEETS POST WITH QUOTE FROM MUSSOLINI

by Lauren Wellman

Donald Trump decided to retweet a Benito Mussolini quote originally posted by Twitter bot that Gawker had made several months ago, expressly for the purpose of goading Trump into retweeting a Benito Mussolini quote. In sending out that one little tweet, Donald Trump proved the point we had in mind when we created that bot: to show that Trump’s rhetoric is often indistinguishable from that of history’s most vainglorious and authoritarian fascist dictators—Benito Mussolini, specifically. –Gawker, March 1, 2016

"It is better to live one day as a
lion than one hundred days as a sheep,"
Benito Mussolini railed. Has a
retweet awakened people from their sleep?

What Donald Trump, il Duce, quick observes--
his own reflection, parody revealed
("It is better to reign in hell than serve
in heav'n," from which John Milton's Satan's sealed)--

Is stained in colors of malignant love
of self profound. Releasing greenhouse gas
in every bite of sound, he sends above
such fumes that trap all reason under glass.

Now long from paradise the nation lost,
the world's sheep won't pay the lions' cost.


Lauren Wellman is a writer and editor living in Tijuana, Mexico. Her poetry has been published in The Bitter Oleander, City Works and the San Diego Poetry Annual.

SAME SCRIPTURE, DIFFERENT DEITY

by Tom Russell

The Bible gets used like a Swiss Army Knife
by sanctimonious cherubs thrashing about
with defective right wings.
Every time they decide to open
another vessel of anger, hate, or judgment
they turn to these writings
for a blade, a corkscrew, or pliers
to open it and allow the toxin therein
to contaminate the conversation.

They see God as a cantankerous old white man
who throws thunderbolts at kids who
get too close to His lawn.

Here’s the church, here’s the steeple.
Here’s God threatening to smite the people.

These same zealots say there is legitimate rape
that is a gift from Him
on this 5,000-year-old Earth.

Remember, you were put here to suffer.

Boy Scouts shall surely have a Heavenly Reward
but Satan walks door-to-door with those little girls
who sell lesbianism, communism, and abortion
at three-fifty a box.

The Raging Right says the God they created in their own image
loves you so much
that you’re going straight to Hell.

It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle
than for them to preach compassion and hope
instead of fire and damnation.
Inclusion instead of exclusion.

Resist the darkness and
let there be light.


Tom Russell works at the Omaha Public Library in the extremely red state of Nebraska. Extremely red. Extremely.

CORPORATE HEAVENARCHY

by Sonya Groves

Citigroup and the Justice Department have agreed to a $7 billion deal that will settle a federal investigation into the mortgage securities the bank sold in the run-up to the financial crisis. “The bank’s misconduct was egregious,’’ Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a statement. “As a result of their assurances that toxic financial products were sound, Citigroup was able to expand its market share and increase profits.” --NY Times, July 14, 2014

  “His main man Satan planting the learning trees of consciousness” --Miguel Piñero

And the Devil attended the dance

of the button downs, he was surprised

by their invitation.

God normally attended

their balls.

But God had grown bored.

Extortion,

greed,

fraud,

poverty

had played out their songs,

so God gave way to Satan.

Typical of management, Satan thought

to pass the shit to a farmer of human

sorrow and expect more profit 

with the same staff.

He wanted a raise
and a promotion.


Sonya Groves is a teacher of English and History in San Antonio. She has published a short story in the Abydos Education Journal, has poetry publications in La Noria, The Voices Project, Aries, and Cliterature.  She has been a conference presenter at the East Carolina University Multi-Cultural Literature Review Conference.  Currently she is pursuing her Master’s degree in English at Our Lady of the Lake University.

BE OUTRAGED

by Joan Mazza

Image source: Mashable

The morning news is meant to wake you up.

Your phone records are being collected
at the government’s request. The deep sea
floor is littered with trash, most of it recyclable.

A man running for lieutenant governor in Virginia
warns that Yoga lures Satan into your life because
you empty yourself during meditation.

In Texas, a man was acquitted of murder after a date
with an escort who refused to have sex with him.
He shot her and took back the 150 dollars he’d paid.

It’s not even six and I haven’t made coffee and gray
wolves are no longer an endangered species. Isn’t it
too early to despair, especially over gray hair?

China, whose milk industry killed and maimed
their own children, now owns Smithfield farms,
largest pork producer to the world.

A pregnant actress tried to frame her estranged
husband for bioterrorism by sending ricin letters
to President Obama and Mayor Bloomberg.

Why worry when there’s so much good news? Cheating
wives are ready to have an affair with me NOW!
Beautiful Russian women want to marry me.

Plenty of Viagra available for the many men
in my life. And yours, too. We can have solar
power installed in our homes at no cost at all.

Several lending companies will deposit 2,500
dollars into my account in the next ninety seconds.
Why would I accept a pittance when I can have

9.2 million? Surprise— I’m next of kin to Roger Morris
who died in a plane crash in 2004! I’ll just tell them
where to deposit the money. No bad news today.


Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, sex therapist, writing coach and seminar leader. She is the author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Perigee/Penguin/Putnam), and her work has appeared in Cider Press Review, Rattle, Off the Coast, Kestrel, Permafrost, Slipstream, American Journal of Nursing, The MacGuffin, Writer’s Digest, Emerge Literary Journal, the minnesota review, Personal Journaling, and Playgirl. She now writes poetry and does fabric and paper art in rural central Virginia. “By reading and writing poetry, I come to terms with my obsessions.”