ENABLERS

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

 

If you let your sons win at card games,          they will never learn strategy.

If you talk down to them using simple baby words,       they won't understand complexity.

Because you don’t want them to fail,                   you don’t make them do anything hard.

You accept every lie because it is easier   and more comfortable than checking up.

If your son is always where the trouble is,       your son is the trouble.

Your son knows you will bail him out,     make the excuse, buy him another car.

Hell, you might even buy him the gun          he uses to murder a man and then

kill himself.                     Your love knows no bounds.

Author’s note: I saw something like this play out in my own life when my stepmother did provide the gun my brother used at the end of the poem because she could not say no to him.

Elizabeth Kerlikowske teaches ekphrastic writing at the Kalamazoo Institute of Art and volunteers at an alternative high school. 

LEARNING HER ABCs

by Madlynn Haber

A tiny girl, with sweet face, gentle features,

soft voice, recites her ABCs for me.

She learned them from an older, bolder cousin. 

The speech is hard for my aged ears to decipher. 

Mingled languages, English, Spanish, baby talk, 

an imitation of the elder cousin’s careful pronunciation. 

She smiles shyly, appreciating my attentive listening 

without noticing my lack of comprehension.

Her mother was not deported today.

 

The mother showed up at the immigration center 

with the little girl in her arms. The fearful father 

stayed home. Bail money collected by well-meaning 

neighbors filled her pockets, just in case.

Sighs of relief as she returns with a four-month reprieve. 

The little one will know her letters and some numbers, 

in English, the language of the only home 

she's ever known, by the time she escorts her mother 

to the immigration office again in July.

Madlynn Haber is the author of Seasons of Sorrow and Joy (Metaphysical Fox Press, 2025). She lives in a cohousing community in Northampton, Massachusetts.Her writing has been published in many literary journals and anthologies including, Eunoia Review, Months to Years, Orenaug Mountain Poetry Journal, Bright Flash Literary Review, Sheila-Na-Gig and The Metaworker Literary Magazine.

PURSUANT

by J.I. Kleinberg

National Transportation Safety Board investigators examine the recovered engine of the DHC-3 Turbine Otter, two weeks after it crashed off Whidbey Island last September.(NTSB) via The Seattle Times, August 24, 2023

     Stories seen in The Seattle Times, August 25, 2023:

“Lawsuits filed over seaplane crash off Whidbey in 2022”

“Maui County sues, claiming utility’s lines sparked blaze”

“Feds file lawsuit against SpaceX over hiring allegations”

“Group sues Kenmore over renter-protection ordinances”

 

In keeping with trending news,

I’ve decided I’m going to sue God.

It has become obvious and inarguable

that I bear no responsibility 

for my own fuckups or for my trespass

on others. Someone must be blamed,

and God, who seems mostly to do

nothing at all and has the deepest

of all deep pockets and all the time

in the world, is in the frame.

I trust that God will surrender

to authorities and will be held

without bail.

J.I. Kleinberg is an artist, poet, and freelance writer. Her poetry has appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, Diagram, The Indianapolis Review, The Madrona Project, Sheila-Na-Gig, and many other print and online journals and anthologies worldwide. She lives in Bellingham, Washington, USA and online at chocolateisaverb.wordpress.com and has chapbooks forthcoming from Bottlecap Press, Ravenna Press, and Milk & Cake Press.

SCURRYING

by Carl Mayfield 

A man is a child
at both ends of life

and much of the time
between dawn and dusk,

touching his toes
to illustrate how the head

can drop out of sight
and still send thoughts

scurrying in every direction
to bounce off other heads

not all there but alive
in a juice neither visible

nor mute, allowing the new arrival
to pick up a language

to discover how far away
words can be from what matters

while noticing how few travelers
sense there is but one tribe

gathered under a toxic sky
which kills everyone, though

not all look up in time to see
their assassin—themselves—

winking back. A pail should be issued
at birth, to play in the sand at first,

then later to bail water out of the desert
as the second childhood shows up,

a little too late to be enjoyed
but with no less power to stun

as it performs the dead man's float.

Carl Mayfield lives and writes at the extreme northern edge of the Chihuahua Desert. His two most recent chapbooks are High Desert Cameos and Gather Round All Ye Wild Children of the Defrocked Atom.

CLASS CARFARE

by M. A. Schaffner

"Decaying City" by FlatCap Illustration

Those without sons in penitentiaries
with money that they’ll never need for bail,
who schedule annual physicals on time
believing nothing bad can come of it,

may wonder at the ones who make their salads
or drive cabs in small towns and case pawn shops
for CDs to resell at flea markets,
or save pills from the emergency room

for when the pain stops and they can enjoy them.
Their grandfathers built the cities they know
in sordid sometimes dangerous decline,
connected to each other on highways

increasingly broken, or rails sagged by freight
searching for a promise or one big score,
aging fast and leaving their unused years
as a gift we have no one to thank for.


M. A. Schaffner has work recently published or forthcoming in The Hollins Critic, Magma, Tulane Review, Gargoyle, and Skirmish Magazine.  Other writings include the poetry collection The Good Opinion of Squirrels, and the novel War Boys.  Schaffner used to work as a civil servant, but now serves civil pugs.