INTIMIDATION AND BLACKMAIL FOR THE PURPOSE OF TAKING OVER THE WORLD

by Terese Coe

Watch for the multiple rows of replacement teeth,

the not-unfair comparison to sharks,

the antipathies that betray the territorial,

the sonar for the nascent dictatorial.

 

Terese Coe’s poems, prose, and translations appear in The New Verse News, Agenda, Alaska Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, The Classical Outlook, Cyphers, Hopkins Review, Metamorphoses, The Moth, New American Writing, New Scotland Writing, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry Review, The Stinging Fly, Stone Canoe, Threepenny Review, the TLS, and many other international publications. Her book Shot Silk was short-listed for the 2017 Poets Prize, and her poem “More” was heli-dropped across London in the 2012 Olympics Rain of Poems. Giorno Poetry Systems, West Chester Poetry Conference, Barnstone Translation Award, and others have awarded her prizes or honors and scholarships.

RUNAWAY COVID AND THE HAVE NOTS

by Terese Coe

"Did Trump Say More COVID-19 Testing Makes the US Look Bad? The president has been accused of forgetting the people behind the coronavirus case numbers. True." —Snopes

With the poor, poc, and seniors dead,
the Dotard and Bojo are raking in bread.
Few testing sites means few revivals,
no masks or meds, then no survivals.

The people spoke, but they were clawed
by racist, ageist dotard frauds.
The people spoke, the people died.
Covid was oversimplified.

Did Vladimir think of everything
for the cliques of the turkeys à la king?
It’s hardly a story you’ll find is new:
more for the toffs and nothing for you.

Terese Coe's poems and translations appear in Alaska Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, The Moth, New American Writing, New Scotland Writing, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry Review, The Stinging Fly, Threepenny Review, and the TLS, among others. Her collection Shot Silk was short-listed for the 2017 Poets Prize, and her poem "More" was heli-dropped across London for the 2012 Olympics Rain of Poems. Her most recent book is Why You Can’t Go Home Again, and her black comedy Harry Smith at the Chelsea Hotel was recently presented at Dixon Place, NY. 

FREAK

by Terese Coe

In each pathological deal

Freak is petulant, false, and unreal.

His extortion and murk

are what passes for work

while he tweets about copping a feel.

The bigot’s a twist and a troll

whose psychosis has taken a toll

on folks who can’t cope

with a chief misanthrope

traitor who's deep in a hole.

It's past time he gave up the ghost.

Every tweet still drives home that he’s toast:

a demon enraged,

it's time he was caged

and dropped 90 miles off the coast.

Terese Coe’s poems and translations have appeared in 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, New American Writing, Ploughshares, Poetry, Threepenny Review, Agenda, The Moth, New Walk Magazine, New Writing Scotland, Poetry Review, the TLS, The Stinging Fly, and many other publications and anthologies. Her collection Shot Silk was nominated for The Poets Prize of 2017.

REVERSALS

by Terese Coe

In loss is meaning,

in emptiness, seed,

in ruin, a mirror

of wholeness and deed. 

A seed reserves need

and comes to birth

in the presence of water

and sunlight and earth.

And well we may wonder

when there is no birth

when there is no water

what life has been worth.

Terese Coe’s poems and translations have appeared in 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, New American Writing, Ploughshares, Poetry, Threepenny Review, Agenda, The Moth, New Walk Magazine, New Writing Scotland, Poetry Review, the TLS, The Stinging Fly, and many other publications and anthologies. Her latest collection Shot Silk was nominated for The Poets Prize of 2017.

AMERICA

by Terese Coe

"He's now [China's Xi Jinping] president for life. President for life. No, he's great," T***p said. "And look, he was able to do that. I think it's great. Maybe we'll have to give that a shot some day." —CNN, March 4, 2018

Though we took great pains to make it last,
I fear democracy is a thing of the past.


Terese Coe’s poems and translations have appeared in 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, New American Writing, Ploughshares, Poetry, Threepenny Review, Agenda, The Moth, New Walk Magazine, New Writing Scotland, Poetry Review, the TLS, The Stinging Fly, and many other publications and anthologies. Her latest collection Shot Silk was nominated for The Poets Prize of 2017.

TO THE KNOW-IT-ALL

by Terese Coe 

Image from boingboing

After Emily Dickinson

I’m nobody and, as for you,
I frankly cannot construe
how you manage to think mere contempt
could possibly make you exempt
from being a nobody too.

Terese Coe’s poems and translations have appeared in 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, New American Writing, Ploughshares, Poetry, Threepenny Review, Agenda, The Moth, New Walk Magazine, New Writing Scotland, Poetry Review, the TLS, The Stinging Fly, and many other publications and anthologies. Her latest collection Shot Silk was nominated for The Poets Prize of 2017.

REFUGEES

by Terese Coe


The Vitae were not living.
The winds devolved to wild.
Their houses blown to powder,
the children were reviled.

The rancor unforgiving,
the slaughter undefined,
an end would come to giving,
then cursed was humankind.


Terese Coe’s poems and translations have appeared in 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, New American Writing, Ploughshares, Poetry, Threepenny Review, Agenda, The Moth, New Walk Magazine, New Writing Scotland, Poetry Review, the TLS, The Stinging Fly, and many other publications and anthologies. Her latest collection Shot Silk was nominated for The Poets Prize of 2017.

WHITE HOUSE POSITIONS 2017

by Terese Coe

Kellyanne Conway and Stephen Bannon. (Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post)

For those who see no duty
to honor, truth, or beauty,
the taint of corrupt but gainful
employment becomes less painful.


Terese Coe’s poems and translations have appeared in 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, New American Writing, Ploughshares, Poetry, Threepenny Review, Agenda, The Moth, New Walk Magazine, New Writing Scotland, Poetry Review, the TLS, The Stinging Fly, and many other publications and anthologies. Her latest collection is Shot Silk.

EAST THIRTEENTH STREET

by Terese Coe

Eventually he touched upon what she meant to him, not in so many words. In New York on 9-11 she walked the two miles crosstown to his apartment. They needed each other now. No other friends in walking distance. No transportation. Everything had stopped. The city was silent. He had tv news on. They sat on the couch the entire day, transfixed. Soon she could no longer speak. He didn’t see why. Asked her soberly,        

            Are you in shock?
            No, I’m not in shock.
            Why aren’t you talking?
            There’s nothing to say.

He looked at her as if he didn’t understand. He’d been talking to Bob on the phone. She said it more intently, so he’d know.
         
            There’s nothing anyone can say.

His silence may have been a form of agreement. It did not persist.

Terese Coe’s poems and translations have appeared in 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, New American Writing, Ploughshares, Poetry, Threepenny Review, Agenda, The Moth, New Walk Magazine, New Writing Scotland, Poetry Review, the TLS, The Stinging Fly, and many other publications and anthologies. Her latest collection is Shot Silk.

ELIZABETH SCANS THE BUSINESS SECTION

by Terese Coe

How do I loathe thee? See to these:
I despise the slithering maze
of investment bankers’ plays,
their derivative devices
and manipulated prices,
the calculated connivance,
the jacked-up stock contrivance,
the GMO mutations,
the cryptic appropriations
alive with codes and ciphers
engorging weasels and vipers;
the Social Security fix,
the felonious politics,
the safety net protections
lost in mystic elections
where every connected clod
claims to be one with God,
but lives in fear of the Order
of  the Cellphone Vid Recorder.
I condemn thee with robust
expressions of disgust,
I loathe thee like the flood
of Mississippi mud,
I despise thee till obsessed,
disquieted, possessed—
and even for thy perjured shibboleth,
I pray thy greed will sicken thee to death.

Terese Coe’s poems and translations have been published in the TLS, Poetry Review, Agenda, Ploughshares, Poetry, Threepenny Review, New American Writing, and many other journals and anthologies. Her recent collection is Shot Silk.

EMERGENCY ROOM, NYC

by Terese Coe

Sitting on a cot in the walkway of the ER for hours

to get up and walk the circle of disease and decay,

he is struck by the bleeding case, the festering case,

the dying woman no one tends but her daughter.

After four hours the intimidation team of interns

marches in to insist on an overnight stay. You’ll

have a bed within two hours. Another three hours on,

no bed. He cases the joint for exits. Uniformed officers

stand at every exit except one, which is locked,

and prove their seriousness when he

approaches them. Having signed himself in, he is

no longer free to quit the place. He climbs into his

clothing again, saying he’s cold, ambles to the empty

interior hall and waits. Five minutes later a nurse

enters the hall, fails to notice him in the dead

end on the other side, swipes her card on

the pad for the unguarded door and, like a

miracle, passes through the magic portal with her tray

of meds. It remains open just long enough for him to follow

her through unseen. He finds himself in the main hall

of the hospital, suddenly unconstrained across meandering

public areas and out the front door. Intact. At home,

Arlene calls to say she went to visit him in the ER

and they were looking for him: I asked them how you

could have disappeared and a nurse said “He’s not a

psychiatric patient, so we can’t force him to stay.”

He says, “If I’d been there any longer, I would have been

a psychiatric patient.” That night the swelling subsides

when he takes a shower. No one calls from the ER

to ask questions--yet.

Terese Coe's poems and translations have appeared in Threepenny Review, Poetry, New American Writing, Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Huffington Post, Poetry Review, TLS, Agenda, New Walk Magazine, Warwick Review, The Stinging Fly, and many other publications, including anthologies. One of her poems was chosen for the 2012 London Olympics Rain of Poems and heli-dropped across London, and her latest collection of poems will be out in February 2015.

A YEAR FOR WEATHER

by Terese Coe

The release of methane on a large scale has long worried scientists. The greenhouse gas is 20 times more damaging to the Earth over a 100-year period than CO2, and is even more potent in the short term. Should the deposits trapped within the Arctic escape into the air, it could kick off a highly destructive climate feedback loop: The methane would cause rapid warming, which would melt more of the Arctic, which would release more methane, which would cause more warming. --Moyers & Company, August 8, 2014

It’s been a year for weather.
Popocatepetl blew—
the cloud of ash dimmed Gretna Green,
Des Moines and Malibu.

In Black Hills, South Dakota, none
survived except the Sioux,
and Stinson Beach was starving but
for grazing caribou.

Spurts of lava blackened Shasta
and on Winnemucca Flats,
fiberoptic cables crackled,
vaporizing technocrats.

The system crashed, the networks fizzed
as if there’d been a purge
the night the blackout swept around
the world in the final surge.

Survivors took to houseboats,
a quake hit Pocatello,
LaBrea tar hit One-O-One
and buried Kate’s bordello.

The ooze has taken life and love,
last going for a fiver,
but fracking and the toxins meant
we lost the last survivor.


Terese Coe’s poems and translations have been published in Agenda (UK), New American Writing, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry Review, The Stinging Fly, The Threepenny Review, and the TLS, among many other journals in the US, UK, and Ireland.