LIBRE VENEZUELA

by Chris L. Butler

Art by Clay Jones

Animus aggression
unhinged & unchecked.

Jet propulsions
accompanied by
mass explosions.
Convicted felons
claiming criminality.

An ironic eruption.
Manifest destiny?
No, even worse.
Manifested violations
of international law.
A cruel collective
giving dangerous
directions to gain
crude investments.
Got other nations
quaking each time
he utters the word

liberation. Cabinets who
claim to be peacemakers 
yet the traits exhibited
are the total opposite
of Quakers. Some see

a circle of friends.
To us? We see a circle
of dictators. Perpetrators
of neo neo colonization.
It’s like we learned nothing
from Iraq, Afghanistan,
Vietnam, Libya, or Syria.
Forget our issues in America
if oil money is on the table.
Copy & paste a country name
here enters Venezuela.

How is this any different?

Chris L. Butler is a Black American-Canadian poet from Philadelphia, PA living in Southern Ontario outside of Toronto. He is the author of the forthcoming chapbook Melodies of the Oppressed (Ethel Zine, 2026) and four other chapbooks. Chris' work has been featured in Variety Pack, Poems for Persons of Interest, Ghost City Review, Pinch Journal, Southern Florida Poetry Journal, and more. He is a 3x Pushcart Prize nominee, and a 1x Best of the Net nominee.

HIT 'EM AGAIN

by Phyllis Wax





Frenzied spectators
shoulder to shoulder
in the stadium, the coliseum,                                            
Hit ‘em again,
harder, harder.
                        Blood sport—
gleaming helmets, shields,
spears, fists, muscled strong-men,
beasts—and the roar
harder, harder.

Pass flasks,
stomp, stomp
in togas
or in team jerseys.
Hit ‘em again.

Week after week
spectators demand            
extreme combat,
harder, harder,
aggression no armor
protects against.                              

Combatants exit arenas    
to cheers    or jeers,
sometimes bloodied, limping
   
to reap the whirlwind years ahead
      self-medicating
                        brawling
              stumbling
                        through     a        fog
                               crippled
                addled.

Monday nights, in front of the
flickering lights, I think about it.


Phyllis Wax writes in Milwaukee on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan.  Among the anthologies and journals in which her poetry has appeared are Rhino, The Widows’ Handbook,Birdsong, Spillway, Peacock Journal, Surreal Poetics, Naugatuck River Review, TheNewVerse.News, Portside, and Star 82 Review. She does not watch football or boxing. Reach her at poetwax38(at)gmail.com.

THE AGGREGATE

by Rick Mullin

Somewhere out there, not so far away
from all the inconsolable commuters
solemnly interred beneath a day
they’d warded off on personal computers,
wakes the shadow of catastrophe
and rage. Certainly in Tobyhanna,
Pennsylvania, there is little laughter.
Promise fades into a knotted red bandanna
in Wisconsin on the morning after.
In New Hampshire, Pyrrhic victory
suggests a mere alternative to death.
My morning walk to Wall Street, out of phase,
slow-motion, almost out of breath,
is interrupted by a stranger’s gaze.
And I don’t like the way he looks at me.


Rick Mullin's new poetry collection is Stignatz & the User of Vicenza.

PUTIN'S STRIDE

by Bill Petz

George W. Bush infamously claimed to have looked into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s eyes and gotten a “sense of his soul,” but perhaps he would have learned more by watching him walk. A recent paper in the British Medical Journal takes up the unexpected question of why Putin, as well as several of his subordinates, walk with an unusual gait, swinging the left arm normally but keeping the right arm close to the hip. Bastiaan R. Bloem, a neurologist at Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre in the Netherlands, says he was first tipped off to the strange gait by one of his former instructors, who noticed it in a video of the Russian president. For Bloem and his co-authors (all “movement disorder enthusiasts,” as he puts it), the video, and others in which Putin walks the same way, set off alarm bells since “unilaterally reduced arm swing” can be a sign of several neurological disorders, including Parkinson’s disease. . . . Videos of other senior Russian officials show the same unusual gait, including Prime Minister (and former president) Dmitry Medvedev, former defense minister Anatoly Serdyukov, and current chief of the presidential administration Sergei Ivanov. “The first thing that came to mind is, ‘What the heck? Is there a Parkinson’s epidemic in the Kremlin?’ ” says Bloem. Another possible explanation surfaced when one of Bloem’s colleagues found a KGB training manual, which instructs operatives that “[w]hen moving, it is absolutely necessary to keep your weapon against the chest or in the right hand. Moving forward should be done with one side, usually the left, turned somewhat in the direction of movement.” The authors have called the ex-KBG agent’s John Wayne–esque walk a “gunslinger’s gait.” This doesn’t mean, literally, that the president is packing. Putin probably never did much gunslinging in the KGB, where his job was to recruit potential operatives in East Germany, but the walk may be a tough-guy affectation akin to his often-coarse choice of language. “Putin is a macho leader who kept his gait to show that he is a KGB veteran,” Bloem says. --Slate, Dec. 15, 2015

Look at Putin's walk.
Right arm doesn't swing,
left does the usual thing.
Seems kinda awkward.

Dutch neurologists took a look.
Nothing new they say,
just a gunslinger's way.
It's in the KGB training book.

Faster to go for their guns.
It might just be,
but let's wait and see
if it's not Parkinson’s.

A loss of control,
dementia and depression
explain his aggression,
lack of soul.


Diagnosed with Parkinson's 10 years ago, Bill Petz' right arm doesn't swing without meds. He lives and writes in the mountains of western North Carolina. His work has been published in Status Hat, The Ashevillle Citizen-Times, The Chronicles of Higher Education, Artists & Writers Quarterly and TheNewVerse.News.