I WILL MISS THE LARGE ANIMALS OF NORTH AMERICA

by Michael Brockley

Woody Guthrie in March 1943.

The bison. The grizzly bears. The jaguars that can’t leap over the wall along the border river. I will miss reading irreverent books. Novels where Jesus has a friend named Biff. Comic books where Deadpool is a hero. I will miss news reporters who know that Kansas City is in Missouri and that Benjamin Franklin never resided in the White House. I will miss the White House. The Smithsonian, the Statue of Liberty, and Yellowstone. I will wonder how Old Faithful might be disappeared. I will miss pennies. And the Beatitudes, the part of the Bible Kurt Vonnegut valued the most. I will miss voting for women. I will miss movies that tell the stories of men and women who don’t look like me. I will miss being able to see Venus and Mars on clear nights. I will miss strawberries and tomatoes and watermelons and sweet potatoes and cranberries and sunflowers and cherries. I will miss guitars with This Machine Kills Fascists scrawled across their bodies. I will miss dogs that look more like wolves than weapons of war. I will miss saying  Feliz Navidad, Fröhliche Weihnachten, and Mele Kalikimaka. I will miss finger-pointing songs. I will miss licorice. Yes, I will even miss licorice.

Michael Brockley is a retired school psychologist who lives in Muncie, Indiana, His prose poems have appeared in Last Stanza Poetry Journal, Red Eft Review, and Unlikely Stories Mark V. Brockley's prose poems are also forthcoming in Ley Lines Literary Review, Seat at the Table, and Alien Buddha.

ELECTION DEFLECTIONS

by Mary K O’Melveny

It is Election Day. The sun streams down

through emptied branches. Chilled air hovers

like a collective inhale. The exhale 

waits in the wings like a novice actor 

battling stage fright. Last night, wind pretended 

to be a train. We woke up thinking we 

had traveled far away and were waiting 

for good news to arrive at the station 

with morning’s mail. But we were still here 

facing down demons, stomachs tied to the tracks.

 

Last time we were set up at a polling

place in Florida. We wore our election

protection badges and hats, as we hoped 

for business. We were nervous. Little

did we know. Now, fear oozes through our veins

with every news bulletin and text.

The pandemic has kept us at home. Our

absentee ballots were mailed. Making calls

calls to others is as close as we’ve gotten

to a voting booth. We’ve been begging.

 

I turn to the rhythm of raking leaves.

Piles of them shift, rustle, crinkle, whisper.

I am in charge of the rake and the broom.

Most will follow my directions. How great

that feels. Predictability has all

but vanished outside my small radius of

oak, maple, chestnut, dogwood, beech, ash.

Later, I am moved to bake a cobbler.

Comfort food may get us through this long night.

Maybe many nights to come. And Woody Guthrie.

Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY.  Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals. Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age is available from Finishing Line Press. Mary’s poetry collection Merging Star Hypotheses was published by Finishing Line Press in January, 2020.

ALL THOSE PATRIOTIC SONGS

by Alan Walowitz

. . . In a democracy, you can only ignore the will of the people for so long and get away with it.                                                

                                                                                                         --John Boehner

Grammar School we sung them 

till the vocal cords popped from our throats,

such scrawny things we were, 

Adam’s apples bobbing, toes tapping,

the girls lined up the other side of the room

their skirts gently swaying in the breeze the radiators made—

all to please those witches, either evil or kind,

who had us in their clutches all day, a year at a time,

these ladies out of Normal School—Miss Johnson and Cochran,

Mrs. Murtaugh and Golsner—with their black high-top lace-up shoes

and penciled brows and rouged cheeks

that always made them look like they’d come through a storm—

and in the wake of the war, maybe they had.

My Country is of Thee—what the hell did that mean?—

O, say does the Star Spangled Ba-a-nner yet wave?

Just look in the corner of the room

where the flag’s hanging limp as the janitor’s mop.

God Bless America, never mentioning the guy who wrote it

was born on the other side.

And shouting the refrain, This Is My Country,

giving it all we had, just like the Mitch Miller record

we’d learned it from. 

They even said we might get to build it.

Though one look now, soft and creaky most mornings,

lovers of the easy life—you’ll know we didn’t help much. 

But our grandparents and parents did—

after hunkered down in steerage, a long, bitter crossing.

Still, that’s not walking from Guatemala

one kid in hand and another tugging at her breast,

and climbing in the back of a rickety old school bus 

to cross pitted roads and streams

and sleeping in rotted VW vans 

along with the hosos and the other takers

who might as soon rape you as get you there.

That’s courage worthy of sparklers and Roman candles

and bottle-rockets whistling, and bombs bursting in air.  

All those patriotic songs--

This is my country! we sung, sometimes even shouted.

Loud and proud, our teachers told us.

Build that wall, my ass!

We say, what Woody Guthrie said,

This land is your land, this land is my land—

you can only hold us off so long. 

Alan Walowitz has been published various places on the web and off.  His work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2017 and 2018 and he is a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry.  His chapbook Exactly Like Love is available from Osedax Press, and his full-length book The Story of the Milkman and other poems is published by Truth Serum Press.