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.