THE FOOLS ON THE HILL

by Steven Kent

"'You have imprisoned our democracy': Inside Republicans' domination of Tennessee"

—The Guardian, April 5, 2024

Despite what y'all were taught in school,

Democracy is not that cool;

We merely use it as a tool

To institute one-party rule.

Folks come to Nashville, see our sights,

While up the hill we're locked in fights*

With Tennesseans claiming rights

They don't deserve now, by our lights.

Theocracy's the goal we've set,

And though we haven't reached it yet

The hour is coming, never fret.

Can't happen here? You wanna bet?

*The state capitol sits four blocks up from Lower Broadway, Nashville's busy tourist district.

Steven Kent is the poetic alter ego of writer, musician, and resident of Nashville, Tennessee Kent Burnside. His work appears in 251, Asses of Parnassus, Journal of Formal Poetry, Light, Lighten Up Online, New Verse News, Philosophy Now, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, and Snakeskin. His collection I Tried (And Other Poems, Too) was published in 2023 by Kelsay Books.

POGUE

a duet-poem

by James Schwartz & Joshua Merchant 

Dedicated to LGBTQ Africa 

Uganda / Iraq / Iran / Tennessee ban

Man / Man / Referendum / Under ban

The streets are red / Throats red

Men of God mock our dead.

bury me under your usages 

of my cousins you told to be 

real enough to see seventeen 

under an underpass pass the school.

Priests / Preachers / Pastors / Political

Queers / Debacle / Death / Ridicule

The streets are silent / Mob violent

The Church is barred / Shamans silent.

loudly calling us everything under

the book bins by burning the cooked 

pens held by our teachers your forefathers 

sent by a ship disguised as emails and hit send.

Scott Lively / Greg Locke / Exporting hate

In AK-America / Always great

In Harvey Milk / David Kato / Frank Mugisha we trust

In rainbow love we trust /

a bloodlust called me by your name. spoke of God. 

my father taught me the difference between 

little and big G’s. I know your wallet knows us well. 

which pocket swells when you hear a bullet shelled? 

Uganda / Iraq / Iran / Florida ban

Man / Man / Under ban

Republicans going rogue

Preachers / Same thing / pogue. 

James Schwartz is a poet & author of various poetry collections including The Literary Party: Growing Up Gay and Amish in America (Kindle, 2011), Punatic (Writing Knights Press, 2019) & most recently Motor City Mix, Sunset in Rome (Alien Buddha Press, 2022). He resides in Detroit, Michigan. Twitter @queeraspoetry  

Joshua Merchant is a Black Queer native of East Oakland, CA exploring what it means to be human as an intersectional being. What they’ve been exploring as of late has been in the realm of loving and what it means while processing trauma. They feel as though as a people, especially those of us more marginalized than others, it has become too common to deny access to our true source of power as a means of feeling powerful. However, they’ve come to recognize with harsh lessons and divine grace that without showing up for ourselves and each other, everything else is null and void. Innately, everything Merchant writes is a love letter to their people. Because of this they’ve had the honor to witness their work being held, understood, published or forthcoming in literary journals such as 580Split, The Root Work Journal, Anvil Tongue Books, Spiritus Mundi Review, and elsewhere. Twitter: @ibursailor_dune 

ALLEN GINSBERG'S "AMERICA" (AND OURS)

by Robert Knox

“America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.” 

—Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems, 1956

 

I am frankly envious of the poet who, on Jan. 17, 1956,

wrote, in a poem entitled “America,”

“America, go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.”

 

Tennessee, I invite, in the same spirit of candor,

go shoot yourself with your absolutely unqualified no-foolin’, stand-your-ground

irredeemably nut-case gun rights laws,

per events on the ground taking place March 28, 2023.

I could simply echo every sentiment in that mid-century poet’s inspired piece

     of unbridled spontaneity

composed on the theme of his America, in which he that mid-century poet vowed,

amid other proclamations,

“I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind”…

but I do not expect to be in my right mind

so long as the YMCA in which I seek to run away from my fury and despair

offers news channels on its TV service available to rats like me

who run on treadmills of anger and despair

 

Networks, that is, on which the munitions-injury expert

is asked to describe the effect of AR ammunition on the bodies of children,

and what I increasingly wish somebody (even crazier than me) would do

to the persons of the elected Tennessee officials

who valiantly protected their freedom-loving constituents from any limitation,

however slight and publicly supported by official law enforcement,

on their natural right to destroy the bodies of children

with whatever armaments the Good Lord, acting through the protected mediation

    of the National Rats Association,

entitles them to possess

 

“America,” Ginsberg demanded in his disarming and eternally youthful way:

“when will you take your clothes off?”

“America” – how’s this for pre-visioning the paramilitary far right?—

“why are your libraries full of tears?”

 

America, we ask in our hair-tearing, torn-clothing way,

Why are your courthouses, state houses, ballot boxes and school boards

full of self-made demagogues who failed to read the books

in their now besieged schoolhouses when they had the chance?

who think that libraries are merely back alleyways for the gang fights

     of the culture wars?

America, we ask, why do the voters of Tennessee develop amnesia of the ballot box?

When will it end, America, your war on humanity?

When will you be worthy of your blues singers, jazzmen, street corner poets,

         dancers on the page as well as on the stage?

When will you invite Stephen Colbert to be the speaker at the next inauguration?

America, the cherry trees are blossoming

and I feel sentimental about the days of wine and roses and that legendary decade ban

     on assault rifles…

and even when the party of Richard Nixon was, by comparison, a beacon of moderation

Americans, we are obsessed by media, by the Chinese timebomb that goes TikTok, TikTok

 

America, the best minds of my generation are already underground

America, there is nobody left to vote for

America, our ancestors saved the world from fascism

But all the fascists have to do today is show their pure-white fannies on TV

and the writing on the wall goes tic-toc-clock, as the timebomb of private self-interest

     melts the glaciers

and brings the ocean to your living room

just before the signoff of the foxed and phony nooz

 

America, you are teaching all the world how to kill people,

     best result for the buck

Because that is all you remember how to do

Robert Knox is a poet, fiction writer, Boston Globe correspondent, and the author of the recently published collection of linked short stories, titled House Stories. As a contributing editor for the online poetry journal Verse-Virtual, his poems appear regularly on that site.

ANTIQUES OR ARTIFACTS

by Carol Parris Krauss

by David Horsey

Some people like to comb the beach for gold coins, silver medals.

There’s an entire group of Civil War buffs who scan the fields
of Suffolk, traipse down to the marsh looking for mini-balls 
and musket pieces. You can purchase the luxury metal detector
for just over a hundred bucks plus shipping online. Artifacts. 

Webster defines the word as an item of cultural or historical interest. 
Pieces of who we were, the battles we chose. I know a man who 
has an entire room walled with knotty-pine shelves 
where he displays his Rebel buttons, Union canteens,
and the occasion dried-up timber rattler. His wife watches 
from the kitchen window as he walks the fallow fields 
with his robot arm shaking. Hours later, he comes inside
and grabs his iced tea. Two lemons. Plops down on the plaid couch
he inherited from Me-maw and begins to watch Live @ Five. 

Breaking news coming from Tennessee. How an entire building
seems to be jam-packed with artifacts. Old white antiques
hidden away in locked rooms. Secrets covered in a layer of dust.

Carol Parris Krauss loves to use vivid imagery. Her work is in One Art, The SC Review, Louisiana Literature, Broadkill Review, Story South, and Susurrus. She was recognized by the UVA press as a Best New Poet and her first book Just a Spit Down the Road was published by Kelsay.

UNOPTIMISTIC DAY

by Barbara Schweitzer 

Tennessee Republicans’ ruthless use of their state House supermajority to expel two young Black lawmakers for breaching decorum exposed a torrent of political forces that are transforming American politics at the grassroots. The GOP action, after the lawmakers had led a gun control protest from the House floor in response to last week’s Nashville school shooting, created a snapshot of how two halves of a diversifying and increasingly self-estranged nation are being pulled apart. AP Photo by George Walker IV: Justin Jones, Gloria Johnson and Justin Pearson raise their hands outside the state House chamber after Jones and Pearson were expelled from the legislature on Thursday, April 6, 2023, in Nashville. —CNN, April 7, 2023

I read the political news
and then I worry.
I go upstairs to the writing
room and stare.
I kill a moth that has
flown by our tacky traps
in the hopes that it is
the last one so I might
again pull the cashmeres
(gifts over years)
out of the cedar trunk
yes cedar trunk but no
it does not protect.
Every November I see
the damage little things
can do, like worries,
wormholes in everyday:
how will we survive
inside all this hatred
what is wrong with humans
how can we believe in evolution
when lame brains govern
and all are men at the root
and they are not created
equal...  I must believe but... 
It is just that we are not winged
and we turn to dust so quickly
it takes only a finger to squash
a moth and just five pounds
of pressure on that finger 
to kill us. Guns and men 
who rule will soon too
be dust, unfortunately 
most not before us.

Barbara Schweitzer is the author of 33 1/3: Soap Opera Sonnets (Little Pear Press, 2008) and is now returning to poetry after a decade of writing (more or less) for theatre (which is a very different experience).

MESSAGE TO MY DAUGHTER: WE COULD HAVE DIED TODAY

by Marsha Owens

A child weeps while on the bus leaving the Covenant School. (Nicole Hester/The Tennessean/AP via The WashingtonPost

but we did not… because having finished elementary, middle, and high school, also college, you, thank God, are still alive, and then you majored in education, once a noble profession, spent years as  an elementary school teacher and, with experience, qualified to be an assistant principal, but awhile back, you left the teaching profession for good because you decided it was   not a hill to die on (my words, not yours), and I retired from teaching years ago carrying my life with me, so I say now ‘thank you, Jesus,’  though I doubt Jesus has anything to do with this carnage that tramples America and children and schools today, that declares guns rank higher on the scale of necessities than education,  teachers, and  children’s lives.

Marsha Owens is a retired teacher who lives and writes in Richmond, VA, and at times, along the banks of the beautiful Chesapeake Bay. Her essays and poetry have appeared in both print and online publications including The Sun, The Dead Mule, Huffington Post, Wild Word Anthology, Rat’s Ass Review, Rise Up Review, PoetsReadingtheNews, and The New Verse News. She is a co-editor of the poetry anthology Lingering in the Margins, and her chapbook She Watered Her Flowers in the Morning is available by Finishing Line Press.

YO MUVA

by Judy Juanita

Don't know Scott  Adams or his mother, 

Dilbert's done 

Yo muva

Don't know Tyre Nichols' mother

RowVaughn Wells wearing the shroud 

in Tennessee

(this week)

But to the five little pigs in black-skinned masks 

In Tennessee 

(this week)

Yo muva

Where is George Floyd's mother?

Where is she?

My God. Where is she?

Can such a body of water be found on a map?

"Your mama’s a whore, sucker,” Eldridge shouted at University of California, Berkeley in his last demented era
Yo muva

George Floyd begged for his muva
Long gone from this bitter earth

Tyre called for his muva
Three blocks away

The muva in me can't stomach 
one more investigation 
No more chest thumping
the muva in me won't last 
one more minute
Yo muva 
Yo muva
Yo muva
Yo muva

I told my grandson
 I HATE WHITE PEOPLE 
Then I qualified it. 
NOT ALL WHITE PEOPLE, NOT MY FRIENDS, NOT INDIVIDUALS, JUST THIS ROTTEN HOLLYWOOD-BASTARDIZED APPROPRIATED CULTURE THAT HAS GLORIFIED WHITE PEOPLE AND GIVEN EVERYONE PERMISSION TO EXTERMINATE US.
Permission to hold us on the ground and exterminate us like vermin

But that dresses up "the talk"
What I have to say
To the nth degree
Where karma waits like a volcano
Where the long arc of justice bends
And bends until it breaks
And gets repaired with Krazy Glue 
Where some Pope sits on a throne with a potty seat hooked up beneath his flaccid ass 
In between “the talks” about keeping his hands visible on the steering wheel
And being careful about predawn sneaky links in ritzy white neighborhoods

Is

Yo muva


Judy Juanita's semi-autobiographical novel about her youthful experience in the Black Panther Party Virgin Soul was published by Viking in 2012. In 2021, her short story collection The High Price of Freeways (Livingston Press, 2022) won the Tartt Fiction Prize. Her poetry collection Manhattan my ass, you're in Oakland won the American Book Award in 2021. She teaches writing at the University of California, Berkeley.

MOUNDS OF BOOKS OUTSIDE OF NASHVILLE

by Zebulon Huset

My freshmen students start Fahrenheit 451 next week—

today a Tennessee pastor lights back into the old chestnut

 

of Harry Potter infecting children with witchcraft or Twilight 

spreading the cheesy demons of vampiric thoughts. Roiling 

 

on the self-righteous fury of the Neo-Nazi echo chamber

that rebounds cacophonous  insecurities and fear like

 

the crystals that create a great fortress of solitude. Riled 

up by the downfall of monuments raised by Daughters

 

of the Confederacy, by schools teaching history

that covers even half of the truth about their great

 

grandparents, by the ricocheting of rage. Opposite

of a sensory deprivation tank that saps sounds

 

and light and leaves one with just the mortal drumbeat,

overwhelming sound of blood pulsing through ear-arteries.

 

The realization that self is both loud and fragile,

that our brittle hold on life can crumble at any moment

 

and it’s not witchcraft or the past that are frothing

at the doorway of extremism, but the hand grasping

 

the bulk-purchased bottle of lighter fluid, the voice

booming from their own mouths, the fire lapping

 

their stubby little fingertips.

 

Zebulon Huset is a teacher, writer and photographer. He won the Gulf Stream 2020 Summer Poetry Contest and his writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Rattle, Texas Review, North American Review, Meridian, The Southern Review, Fence, and many others. He publishes the prompt blog Notebooking Daily, and edits the journals Coastal Shelf and Sparked.

AND SOMEBODY LAY THIS BOOK DOWN

A found poem of lines selected from the transcript of the January meeting of the McMinn County, Tennessee School Board considering the removal of the Pulitzer Prize winning book Maus from their curriculum teaching about the Holocaust.

by Dick Westheimer

Cartoon by Andy Marlette, Pensacola News Journal, January 29, 2022

     “There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.” 

― Hannah Arendt

You see the naked pictures. You see the razor.

You see the blade where the mom is cutting herself. 

You see her laying in a pool of her own blood.

Please, somebody lay this book down.

Sure, we do the Holocaust, but we have

processes and procedures in place here. 

We can tell the kids what happened, but we don’t need 

all the nakedness and all the other stuff.

Can I lay that in front of a child?

It ain’t happening. It is not happening.

It’s like when you’re watching TV 

and a cuss word or nude scene comes on

and you don’t look at it. You don’t look at it.

Again, reading this to myself, it was decent 

until the end. Until the end,

I really enjoyed it. I liked it. 

The end was stupid, though.

It shows people hanging, it shows them 

killing kids. It is not wise or healthy

Somebody lay this book down and say 

Look it was taught! Look it was taught! 

Say! Look! It was taught!

If I was trying to indoctrinate somebody’s kids, 

this is how I would do it. You put this stuff just so, 

this vulgarity, and the kids, they soak it in.

We don’t need the scene of the mice hanging from the tree.

We don’t need all the nakedness and all the other stuff.

We don’t need the curse words and foul language.

I never had a book with a naked picture in it! 

I never had a book with foul language!

So I vote to do away with the book.

I Vote To Do Away With The Book!

And somebody lay this book down, because

somebody will say look, it was taught in the classrooms. 

So, Madam Chairman. I’m going to bring this to a head. 

I started it so now I am going to bring it to a head. 

I move that we remove this book.

I move that we remove this book!

Dick Westheimer has—in the company of his wife Debbie—lived, gardened and raised five children on their plot of land in rural southwest Ohio. He is a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist. In addition, his recent poems have appeared or are upcoming in Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, Rise Up Review, Sheila Na-Gig, Snapdragon Journal of Art and Healing, and Cutthroat.

WHERE TRUTH AND THREAT TANGLE IN KNOTS OF NO NAME

by Jen Schneider

Judge Donna Scott Davenport during a 2017 deposition. Credit: Obtained by ProPublica and Nashville Public Radio.

Black Children Were Jailed for a Crime That Doesn’t Exist. Almost Nothing Happened to the Adults in Charge: Judge Donna Scott Davenport oversees a juvenile justice system in Rutherford County, Tennessee, with a staggering history of jailing children. She said kids must face consequences, which rarely seem to apply to her or the other adults in charge. —Meribah Knight, Nashville Public Radio, and Ken Armstrong, ProPublica, October 8, 2021

tiny babies on metal swings,

toss rubber balls on concrete

tiny babies clothed in fabric

of NBA stars & NBC scenes

chalk words on concrete

tiny babies entrusted

to institutions of unknown pores

& unsuspecting wills

serve time on concrete

 

NO

           1. __ 2. __ 3. __

 

cold benches

cold eyes

filters everywhere

 

tiny babies on metal cots

fight demons of demonstrative

power & fail to sleep

 

NO

           1. __ 2. __ 3. __

 

cold lots (& bots)

cold plots

filters everywhere

 

dark curtains blanket lives

& squash truths

dark curtains conceal filters

& give breadth to those who

struggle to breathe

journals fail not to reveal

false truths. journalists

fight to reveal hidden truths

 

NO

           1. __ 2. __ 3. __

 

cold data

cold calls

filters everywhere

 

as locks turn right

& shifts (shifty eyes) turn left

truths & threats tangle

in knots (& playground lots) of no name

time ticks. clocks run.colds (& charges) linger.

tiny babies of metal

fences take charge. document false charges.

tally lives on indefinite pause

& subject to indeterminate pain

judicial oaths & pledges

of allegiance

stream syllables of familiar

themes

1. Liberty 2. Justice 3. All

& strings of familiar

knots

1. Truth 2. Transparency 3. All

& cracks of familiar

ideals

1. Peace 2. Fairness 3. All

frayed fibers, tangled twine

false/falsified/fabricated (truths, charges, crimes)  

true fear (& dark curtains) everywhere

Jen Schneider is an educator who lives, writes, and works in small spaces throughout Pennsylvania. She is a Best of the Net nominee, with stories, poems, and essays published in a wide variety of literary and scholarly journals. She is the author of Invisible Ink (Toho Pub), On Daily Puzzles: (Un)locking Invisibility (forthcoming, Moonstone Press), and Blindfolds, Bruises, and Breakups (forthcoming Atmosphere Press).

IF GOD GOT US TO IT, HE'LL GET US THROUGH IT, SAID THE MUFFIN PAN TO THE BACON PRESS

 by Laura Lee Washburn

Image source: John Darkow/Columbia [MO] Daily Tribune

You like your muffin pan with butter.
You eat it whole so the cups don’t stick
in your throat.  The butter helps.
You like your waiters black in white face.

You like stock still dark black men with trays for a party.
You drink iced tea with mint.  You smile
and belch a champagne-coated muffin tin burp.
You’re like a cookbook with hand drawings

of the Skyline drive, Smithfield ham on buttered
biscuits.  The muffin tin constipates you
a little bit.  China will manage spiral-cut hams
with your face on their packages.  China
makes your muffin tins bigger every year.

You eat muffin tins for lunch.  You eat
muffin tins, buttered, for breakfast.
You keep the cast iron bacon press greased
with bacon fat.  Nothing sticks in your craw.

The cast iron bacon press tastes like Tennessee
in 1963.  Your little monkey cooks it best.
Everything’s so hard to pass these days,
goes down easy, but sticks and stinks, a black
hard stool in your soft pink bowels.


Laura Lee Washburn is the Director of Creative Writing at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, and the author of This Good Warm Place: 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition (March Street) and Watching the Contortionists (Palanquin Chapbook Prize).  Her poetry has appeared in such journals as Cavalier Literary Couture, Carolina Quarterly, Ninth Letter, The Sun, Red Rock Review, and Valparaiso Review.  Born in Virginia Beach, Virginia, she has also lived and worked in Arizona and in Missouri.  She is married to the writer Roland Sodowsky.