DONALD J. T***P AND XI JINPING HAVE TEA OVER ZOOM

by Victor D. Infante  

Both linger at the mirror before a servant turns the computer on for them.
Appearances are everything in the Grand Guignol of nation states.
What's tardiness in the face of statistics? Numbers are balloon animals.
They can bend them into any shape they wish. To a point.

One is drinking Coca Cola from his teacup, sugar and toxins coursing his veins.
He has long forgotten ever quenching his thirst without metallic aftertaste.
In this, he is very much the embodiment of America.
The other has stopped taking honey in his tea.
Winnie the Pooh has claimed even this: An unfair comparison.
He is wearing pants. Let all the world know he is wearing pants.

There are no cameras, so neither talks of vaccines or death knells.
One has fortune, the other debt, and this propels the vacuous dance.
Nielsen ratings make a conversational cameo.
One explains it is a measure of value. The other knows this.
That's why he limits what is seen. Envy radiates across oceans.

One looks out the window at the bodies stacked across his lawn.
He wants to have them removed, but there's some inexplicable delay.
One decides to make a monument of charnel houses, frames carnage as a gift.
No one cautions against the idea: Indeed, it's all such men have ever given.

Victor D. Infante is the Entertainment Editor for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, the content editor for Worcester Magazine, and the author of City of Insomnia from Write Bloody Publishing. His poems and stories have appeared in dozens of periodicals, including The Chiron Review, The Collagist, Barrelhouse, Pearl, Spillway, The Nervous Breakdown and Word Riot, as well as in anthologies such as Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry, Spoken Word Revolution Redux, The Last American Valentine: Poems to Seduce and Destroy, Aim For the Head: An Anthology of Zombie Poetry, The Incredible Sestina Anthology, and all three Murder Ink: Tales of New England Newsroom Crime anthologies. He has serious opinions about RuPaul's Drag Race.

CHINA REIGN

by David Feela

Protesters in Hong Kong continued to demand a fully free vote in elections due in 2017 for the post of chief executive - Hong Kong's leader. Numbers were, however, far lower than the previous week. China has said that, under Hong Kong law, voters will be able to vote freely but from an approved list. --Photo by Philippe Lopez/AFP via BBC Week in Pictures

As shelter from Beijing weather,

the hand that holds the umbrella knows

repression shreds all hope

but in Hong Kong each umbrella blossoms

like a flower, shields the blindsided from mace, 

transforms the protester into a shadow 

under Xi Jinping’s glare.  How the years 

of bad luck for opening an umbrella 

must be weighed against the threat 

of living where truth never shines.

Remember this season of umbrellas,

this garden of good intentions.


David Feela writes a monthly column for The Four Corners Free Press and for The Durango Telegraph. A poetry chapbook, Thought Experiments, won the Southwest Poet Series. His first full length poetry book, The Home Atlas appeared in 2009. His new book of essays, How Delicate These Arches  , released through Raven's Eye Press, has been chosen as a finalist for the Colorado Book Award.

NUMBER 9

by Mark Danowsky





Communist Party cadres have filled meeting halls around China to hear a somber, secretive warning issued by senior leaders. Power could escape their grip, they have been told, unless the party eradicates seven subversive currents coursing through Chinese society. These seven perils were enumerated in a memo, referred to as Document No. 9, that bears the unmistakable imprimatur of Xi Jinping, China’s new top leader. The first was “Western constitutional democracy”; others included promoting “universal values” of human rights, Western-inspired notions of media independence and civic participation, ardently pro-market “neo-liberalism,” and “nihilist” criticisms of the party’s traumatic past. --Chris Buckley, NY Times, August 19, 2013


We know all about Document No. 9
number nine, number nine
details of seven deadly sins
who’s to know
about human rights
whatever you’re doing
the media has it wrong
but you know it isn’t
the unseen hand knocking
maybe it’s nothing
more than the past


Mark Danowsky’s poetry has recently appeared in Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Red River Review, Right Hand Pointing, Snow Monkey and The Best of Every Day Poets Anthology Two.  He resides in Northwest Philadelphia and works for a private detective agency.