I AM THE VERY MODEL OF A QANON CONSPIRACY

by Ellen Hawley McWhirter

I am the very model of a QAnon conspiracy

Born and bred to foster fear and rampant insecurity

And through the years, you must admit

I’ve gotten rather good at it:

I am the very model of a QAnon conspiracy.

 

I weaponize the people who feel left behind, and I compel 

their loud attacks on science and on medicine and truth itself.

The stranger that my theories get,

The more that they are shared and spread

‘cause QAnon conspiracies, like COVID, are quite hard to quell.

 

The Democrats are stealing children underneath your very nose

Selling them and eating them and hardly anybody knows.

You must refuse to vaccinate;

Just drink some bleach and you’ll be great,

And watch out for the Deep dark State our hero Trump tried to expose

The national election it was stolen, it was clearly fraud:

Put Democrats and disagreers all before a firing squad!

The Bible and the Constitution

Call for bloody resolution

Get your guns and bombs, and know that Jesus surely would applaud.

 

The wearing of a mask is an affront to true civility

The bearing of a weapon anywhere is basic liberty

Mass shootings are a lie perverse,

And climate change is even worse

You must defend these truths with Christian hatred and hostility.

 

The only threat that worries me is thinking that is critical,

That shows my puppeteering, and is clear and analytical,

Exposes my hypocrisy,

and questions what’s in it for me,

and highlights common ground across our differences political.

 

Now if you think I’m bragging, it’s just not that hard to play this game

When people are unhappy and are seeking someone else to blame

A rumor and some blatant lies,            

And 1-2-3 you’re polarized,

And Jewish lasers shot from space fan all the sparks right into flame.

 

I am the very model of a QAnon conspiracy

Fed by anger, ignorance, and hunger for identity

I’m anti-logic, anti-truth,

I’m anti-them and all for you:

I am the very model of a QAnon conspiracy.

Ellen Hawley McWhirter is a professor of counseling psychology and writes poetry to preserve her sanity.

THE AGE OF MAGA HATS AND A DIMWIT VIRUS

by Lyndi Waters                

 

More Than a Feeling by Matt Lubchansky, The Nib, April 22, 2020

Our generation passes
with both hands over our eyes,
yet moving a certain bluster
through the world as owners,

out the other side
as whimpering eye blinks,
departing roughly the same time
realization dawns

of how the world has carved us,
tumbled us in the rapids
until our edges are smooth.
The preachers wave their cleavers,

hack us apart like fresh fish at market,
politicians widen the space
between the halves
then stuff them with our own fears.

How long will we acquiesce
to rock hunters who pass truth by
in search of people to fit their stories,
characters who have already

been ear-tagged through fable,
pressed into service,
handed scripts and dark glasses.
And yet we continue on with a dimwit virus,

MAGA hats, sippy cups of bleach,
protesters demanding haircuts,
and quiet poets, who navel gaze and describe sunsets
while Denise Levertov rolls in her grave.

Lyndi Waters is a Pushcart Prize nominee, winner of the 2019 Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Writing Award, the 2018 Eugene V. Shea National Poetry Contest, and the 2019 Wyoming Writers, Inc. free verse contest. Lyndi’s poems have been published, or are forthcoming, in literary magazines and anthologies such as The Owen Wister Review, Gyroscope Review, New Verse News, Picaroon Poetry, Unbroken Journal, Blood, Water, Wind, and Stone: An Anthology of Wyoming Writers (Sastrugi Press, 2016), and Troubadour (Picaroon Poetry Press, U.K., 2017).