SERMON FOR THE SIRENIAN

by Jenna Le

State and federal wildlife authorities were investigating after a manatee with “Trump” on its back was spotted in Florida on Sunday. Credit: Hailey Warrington, The New York Times, January 11, 2021.

A manatee is no cartouche.

A manatee is not a blimp.

No pharoah's name or Nike swoosh

carved in her flanks shall ever crimp 

her honey-languid swimming strokes.

She is no singing telegram,

no contrail, and no ad for smokes.

The same way you would treat the lamb, 

thus you shall treat the manatee,

whose every breath's a stinky huff,

who shuffles upstream clownishly.

Love's not just for the pretty stuff, 

a fact I thought you'd understand.

Man's what he is, yet God loved man.

Jenna Le is the author of Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011) and A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2017), a Second Place winner in the Elgin Awards. She was selected by Marilyn Nelson as winner of Poetry By The Sea’s inaugural sonnet competition and by Julie Kane as winner of Poetry By The Sea’s sonnet crown competition the following year. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in AGNI, Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, and West Branch. 

BEHIND THE MILLION DOLLAR AD

by Devon Balwit

Believe in something even if it means sacrificing

everything. We read the words, and that part of us

suckled on tales of heroes rallies as behind a pennant

on the battlefield or before splintering city gates

                                                            —and yet

we are reading ad copy, a sly way to light a match

beneath our purchasing power. Fight the machine,

we’re prompted by the machine itself, so vast

as to be almost invisible.

                                                            —a galaxy

of nodes. This time, proceeds go to charity,

yet still we wouldn’t trade places with a worker

in this corporation’s factories, live off their wage,

raise children by their dumps. How deep does good go?

                                                            —How deep

is deep enough? Better than nothing,

some insist. With eyes keen enough to see

such a fraction, we must trace the whole web,

alert to its snag, the hypnotic vibration as the spider

                                                            —approaches

Devon Balwit has six chapbooks and three collections out in the world. Her individual poems can be found here or are forthcoming in journals such as The Cincinnati Review, apt, Posit, Cultural Weekly, Triggerfish, Fifth Wednesday, The Free State Review, Rattle, Poets Reading the News, etc.