THE ELDERS

by Michael Cantor

The city bosses and their smoke filled rooms
gave us Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower;
and once you get beyond cigars and booze,

the smell of Scotch and misbegotten power,
there’s still the knowledge that those drunken fools
picked out Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower.

But now we’ve fixed the system, passed new rules—
the people choose their leaders, not some hacks—
and all acknowledge that those party tools

were mostly focused on each other’s backs.
Today, the public’s voice is clear and loud—
the people choose their leaders, and the hacks

just keep the score; and we can all be proud
that this is how democracy will flower.
Indeed, the public’s voice is clear and loud:

the rule of law has fundamental power.
But every night that inner tune resumes:
The city bosses and their smoke filled rooms
gave us Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower.

Michael Cantor’s first full-length collection Life in the Second Circle (Able Muse Press, 2012) was a finalist for the Able Muse Prize and 2013 Massachusetts Book Award for Poetry. A chapbook The Performer was published in 2007. His work has appeared in The Dark Horse, Measure, Raintown Review, frogpond, New Walk, Think, Light, and numerous other journals and anthologies.

THE NOW PRESIDENT

by Alejandro Escudé

Stiglich cartoon via The Mercury News

“With Twitter as his Excalibur, President Trump takes on his doubters, powered by Diet Coke and long spells of cable news.” —The New York Times, December 9, 2017


Why? They ask. Where’s
the logic? Reason ditched
like an old password.
Meaning based on smirks,
each a swift calculation,
a brand. We worship
Smith's invisible hand.
It does what it does,
its will is indefatigable.
All is genius or craziness.
One could think gambling,
and think of battleships.
Not the scathing solitude
of Churchill but that
of Truman and the bomb.
Yet, that can’t explain
Twitter, the chaos whims,
the bitter word-bones,
the lobbing of stones at
the webbing of Democracy.
To sunlight we gaze
amid echoing gunshots
and plead for a harkening.


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.

THE SECOND BOMB

by Frederick Shiels 

Source: Yamahata photographs © Shogo Yamahata, The Day After the Nagasaki Bombing. The Japan Peace Museum via Morningside Center

Honorable Americans:
​there are not many of us left who were there,​
​to remind you that seventy August 9ths ago
you finished your war job
and 75,000 of our lives on green Kyushu island
three days and three mourning hours after killing even more--
Who knows how many?--
on big Honshu to the north, you ​well ​know ​the name,
Hiroshima, you teach it in your schools.
To be sure, we are linked with ​her​
​our  second, final​, high
superheated mushroom of death
​​Y​our Mr. Truman
didn’t give a speech about Us, we guess he just left
our boiling harbor, our children’s ashes
floating down
like leaves
for days,
to work things out
for themselves.​



Frederick Shiels teaches American foreign policy and history at Mercy College in New York. He has published in Sixfold, The New Verse News, The Hudson River Anthology, and elsewhere. He lived with his family on Kyushu Island, Japan, as a Fulbright Scholar, in 1985, the fortieth anniversary year of the bombing of Nagasaki, not far south. He is the author of a book of foreign policy case studies Preventable Disasters (Rowman & Littlefield) among others.