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. 

ELECTION:2016

by Wendy Taylor Carlisle

Dora vs. Trump Cartoon by ELISE MCCOMB, age14, ROSEVILLE, MINN. (New York Times 2015 Cartoon Contest)

There are only seven plots, we’re told,

        and blunder is this world’s first and second.

                The desire for triumph shoulders at

                        the mother-belly of moral vacuity although,

                                mercifully, not quite hard enough to squeeze out

                                        yet. My friends who are conscientious objectors

or Buddhist, my friends who are in the intellectual closet,

                 even my apathetic friends are all

                         on Short Pierre Street waiting to see

                                 what happens. Because it has been so unbearable,

                                         we have borne it for 18 months—

the N words sprayed on one of our two city busses,

        the theories of corruption, actual corruption. And now,

                after arguing and lamentations, we are a chorus

                        of the damaged, counting their wounds, storing up

                                  experience for a later excuse to whine, Cabo,

                                         Toronto and stark survival on our minds.

Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives and write in the Ozarks. She is the author of two books and three chapbooks, most recently Persephone on the Metro. See her work in Concis, Rat’s Ass Review, Mom Egg Review, and the Kentucky Review.

PARAPHERNALIA

by Kristina England

Image source: TaxProf Blog (in response to “The Sex Toys in the Attic” in the NY Times, November 9, 2013).

The most popular article of the week:
New York Time's "Sex Toys in the Attic,"
some older woman's concerns
about her "romping" days,
some toy she collected from a boyfriend.
Surely she's seen the news -
child porn ring broken up in Canada,
over 300 people involved.
Maybe she wrote the article before
the Toronto mayor took crack,
got cracked, cracked a nation.
Or she wanted to lighten the load.
God knows we need a good laugh
and perhaps the occasional mishap
of some not-so-cozy artifact
found under our mother's bed
is enough to pause this avalanche.
There is, after all, some innocence
left in this disjointed world.
And if there's not,
let's keep pretending
vibrators matter
in all these earthquakes,
tsunamis, the tremor
of our minds.


Kristina England resides in Worcester, Massachusetts.  Her fiction and poetry is published or forthcoming at Gargoyle, Found Poetry Review, The Story Shack, Tipton Poetry Journal, and other journals.